Letterboxd
Letterboxd is easily one of my favorite sites. I started logging movies in 2013, and began using it to find movies to watch shortly after. The community is great, and its reviews rarely (or never) reach Amazon Watch Instant levels of unhelpfulness. There are a few views I find incredibly useful on the site:
http://letterboxd.com/films/by/rating/
View the highest rated movies on Letterboxd. Sort by availibity (select your streaming service of choice), or filter to hide the ones you’ve already seen. Thanks (again) to the community, this list is top-notch.
http://letterboxd.com/lists/
There are piles of great lists to dig through. Here are some of my favorites:
- Quentin Tarantino’s 200 Favorite Films
- What’s the Best Cinematography of All Time?
- Most Fan on Letterboxd
- It’s Pure Science Fiction
- The Noirest of Them All
- Bond Movie Rankings
- Wilhelm Scream
http://letterboxd.com/trentwalton/year/2016/
(See also: 2014 & 2015) If you regularly log/add films (in addition to marking them as liked or watched), you are rewarded with a year in review page. In part, the pages inspired me to be more purposeful about what I watch. Instead of just using trailers and recommendation engines to find movies, I think more about influences, themes, and directors.
http://letterboxd.com/director/alfred-hitchcock/
http://letterboxd.com/director/michael-mann/
These days I follow directors more than actors or franchises—recently enjoying Hitchcock and Mann streaks. I’ll watch most/all of a director’s films over the course of weeks/months and see where the thread leads. With Hitchcock, it led me to wonder what else Joseph Cotton starred in, which led to discovering Touch of Evil and The Third Man.
I’ve been in a boat similar to Khoi for a while—wanting to spend less of my screen time on television and more on movies. Letterboxd has added structure and purpose to that endeavor.
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