movie review site imdb

Whose ratings should you trust? IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, or Fandango?

By Alex Olteanu

A data scientist investigates

Should you watch a movie? Well, there are a lot of factors to consider, such as the director, the actors, and the movie’s budget. Most of us base our decision off of a review, a short trailer, or just by checking the movie’s rating.

There are a few good reasons you would want to avoid reading reviews, or watching a trailer, although they bring much more information than a rating.

First, you may want to completely avoid spoilers, no matter how small. I understand that!

Second, it could be that you want an uninfluenced experience of watching that movie. This usually applies only to reviews, which are sprinkled with frames, like “this is a movie about the complexity of the universe” or “this movie is really not about love”. Once these frames get encoded in your short-term memory, it’s really hard to stop them from interfering with your own movie experience.

Another good reason is that if you’re tired or hurried, you might not want to read a review, let alone watch a 2-minute trailer.

So a numeric movie rating seems to be a good solution in quite a few situations, for quite a few people.

This article aims to recommend a single website to quickly get an accurate movie rating, and offers a robust, data-driven argumentation for it.

Criteria for “the best”

Making such a recommendation is a lot like saying “this is the best place to look for a movie rating,” which is an evaluative statement, resting on some criteria used to determine what is better, what is worse or worst, and what is best, in this case. For my recommendation, I will use one single criterion: a normal distribution.

The best place to look for a movie rating is to see whose ratings are distributed in a pattern which resembles the most, or is identical to, the pattern of a normal distribution, which is this: given a set of values lying in a certain interval, most of them are in the middle of it, and the few others at that interval’s extremes. Generally, this is how a normal (also called Gaussian) distribution looks like:

What’s the rationale behind this criterion? Well, from my own experience consisting of several hundred movies, I can tell that I’ve seen:

• a few outstanding ones that I’ve watched several times
• a couple that were really appalling, and made me regret the time spent watching them
• and a whole bunch of average ones, for most of which I can’t even remember the plot anymore.

I believe that most people — whether critics, cinephiles, or just regular moviegoers — have had a similar experience.

If movie ratings do indeed express movie quality, then we should see the same pattern for both.

Given that most of us assess the bulk of movies as being of an average quality, we should see the same pattern when we analyze movie ratings. A similar logic applies for bad and good movies.

If you’re not yet persuaded that there should be such a correspondence between the patterns, think about the distribution of ratings for a single movie. As many people rate the movie, it’s not a leap of faith to assume that most often there will be many of them with similar preferences. They’ll generally agree that the movie is either bad, average, or good (I will quantify later these qualitative values). Also, there will be a few others who assess the movie with one of the other two qualitative values.

If we visualized the distribution of all the ratings for an individual movie, we would most likely see that one single cluster forms in one of the areas corresponding to a low, an average, or a high rating.

Provided most movies are considered average, the cluster around the average area has the greatest likelihood of occurring, and the other two clusters have a smaller (but still significant) likelihood. (Note that all these likelihoods can be quantified in principle, but this would require a lot of data, and would have the potential to turn this article into a book.)

The least likely would be a uniform distribution in which there are no clusters, and people’s preferences are split almost equally across the three qualitative values.

Given these likelihoods, the distribution of ratings for a large enough sample of movies should be one with a blunt cluster in the average area, bordered by bars of decreasing height (frequency), resembling, thus, a normal distribution.

If you have found all this hard to understand, consider this illustration:

IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Fandango, or Metacritic?

Now that we have a criterion to work with, let’s dive into the data.

There are a lot of websites out there that come up with their own movie ratings. I have chosen only four, mainly based on their popularity, so that I could get ratings for movies with an acceptable number of votes. The happy winners are IMDB , Fandango , Rotten Tomatoes , and Metacritic .

For the last two, I have focused only on their iconic rating types — namely the tomatometer , and the metascore — mainly because these are more visible to the user on each of the websites (meaning it’s quicker to find them). These are also shared on the other two websites (the metascore is shared on IMDB and the tomatometer on Fandango). Besides these iconic ratings, both websites also have a less-featured rating type where only users get to contribute.

I have collected ratings for some of the most voted and reviewed movies in 2016 and 2017. The cleaned dataset has ratings for 214 movies, and can be downloaded from this Github repo .

I haven’t collected ratings for movies released before 2016, simply because a slight change has occurred in Fandango’s rating system soon after Walt Hickey’s analysis , which I will refer to later in this article.

I’m aware that working with a small sample is risky, but at least this is compensated by getting the most recent snapshot of the ratings’ distributions.

Before plotting and interpreting the distributions, let me quantify the qualitative values I used earlier: on a 0 to 10 scale, a bad movie is somewhere between 0 and 3, an average one between 3 and 7, and a good one between 7 and 10.

Please take note of the distinction between quality and quantity. To keep it discernible in what follows, I will refer to ratings (quantity) as being low, average, or high. As before, the movie quality is expressed as bad, average, or good. If you worry about the “average” term being the same, don’t, because I will take care to avoid any ambiguity.

Now let’s take a look at the distributions:

At a simple glance, it can be noticed that the metascore’s histogram (that’s what this kind of graph is called) most closely resembles a normal distribution. It has a thick cluster in the average area composed of bars of irregular heights, which makes the top neither blunt, neither sharp.

However, they are more numerous and taller than the bars in each of the other two areas, which decrease in height towards extremes, more or less gradually. All these clearly indicate that most of the metascores have an average value, which is pretty much what we’re looking for.

In the case of IMDB, the bulk of the distribution is in the average area as well, but there is an obvious skew towards the highest average values. The high ratings area looks similar to what would be expected to be seen for a normal distribution in that part of the histogram. However, the striking feature is that the area representing low movie ratings is completely empty, which raises a big question mark.

Initially, I put the blame on the small sample, thinking that a larger one would do more justice to IMDB. Luckily, I was able to find a ready-made dataset on Kaggle containing IMDB ratings for 4,917 different movies. To my great surprise, the distribution looked like this:

The shape of the distribution looks almost the same as that for the sample with 214 movies, except for the low ratings area, which is in this case feebly populated with 46 movies (out of 4917). The bulk of the values is still in the average area, which makes the IMDB rating worth considering further for a recommendation, although is clearly hard to rival the metascore, with that skew.

Anyway, what’s really great about this outcome is that it can be used as a strong argument to support the thesis that the 214-movies sample is fairly representative for the whole population. In other words, there’s a greater confidence now that the results of this analysis would be the same — or at least similar — to the results reached if absolutely all the movie ratings from all the four websites were analyzed.

With this increased confidence, let’s move on to examining the distribution of Fandango’s ratings, which doesn’t seem to have changed much since Hickey’s analysis. The skew is still visibly towards the higher part of the movie rating spectrum, where most of the ratings reside. The area for the lower half of the average ratings is completely empty, just like the one for low ratings. It can easily be concluded that the distribution is quite far from fitting my criterion. Consequently, I won’t consider it further for a possible recommendation.

(I promise that the torment of scrolling up will end soon. It’s much easier to compare the distributions if they are placed one near the other, rather than having them scattered across the article.)

Lastly, the tomatometer’s distribution is unexpectedly uniform, and would look even flatter under a different binning strategy (a binning strategy is defined by the total number of bars and their ranges; you can play with these two parameters when you’re generating a histogram).

This distribution is not easy to interpret in context, because the tomatometer it’s not a classical rating, but rather represents the percentage of critics who gave a positive review to a movie. This makes it unfit for the bad-average-good qualitative framework, because it makes movies either good, either bad. Anyway, I guess it should still boil down to the same normal distribution, with most of the movies having a moderate difference between the number of positive reviews and the negative ones (rendering many ratings of 30% — 70% positive reviews), and a few movies having a significantly bigger difference, in one way or the other.

Given the last consideration and the shape of the distribution, the tomatometer doesn’t meet my criterion. It could be that a larger sample would do it more justice, but even so, if I were to recommend it, I would do it with some reserves because of the vague positive or negative rating system.

At this point of the analysis, I could say that by looking at the distributions, my recommendation is the metascore.

However, the IMDB’s distribution seems to be worth considering as well, especially if you tweak a little the rating intervals for the three qualitative categories (intervals which I defined myself, more or less arbitrarily). From this perspective, recommending the metascore by mostly doing a visual examination is clearly not enough.

So, I will try to delimit between these two by using a quantitative method.

The idea is to use the Fandango variable as a negative reference, and then determine which variable, from the IMDB rating and the metascore, is the least correlated with it (I call these variables because they can take different values — for example, the metascore is a variable because it takes different values, depending on the movie).

I will simply compute some correlation coefficients, and the variable with the smallest value will be my recommendation (I will explain then how these correlation coefficients work). But before that, let me briefly justify choosing the Fandango variable as a negative reference.

Fandango’s users love movies too much

One reason for this choice is that the distribution of Fandango’s movie ratings is the furthest from that of a normal one, having that obvious skew towards the higher part of the movie ratings spectrum.

The other reason is the cloud of suspicion around Fandango left by Walt Hickey’s analysis . On October 2015, he was also puzzled by a similar distribution, and discovered that on Fandango’s website the numerical ratings were always rounded to the next highest half-star, not to the nearest one (for example, a 4.1 average rating for a movie would have been rounded to 4.5 stars, instead of 4.0).

The Fandango team fixed the biased rating system, and told Hickey that the rating logic was rather a “software glitch” on their website, pointing towards an unbiased system on their mobile app. (More about this on Hickey’s article .) The adjustment did change some statistical parameters for the better, but not enough to convince me not to work with the Fandango variable as a negative reference.

This is what the change looks like:

Now, let’s zoom in on Fandango:

Between the metascore and the IMDB rating, which is the least correlated with the Fandango rating?

The least correlated with the Fandango rating is the metascore. It has a Pearson’s r value of 0.38 with respect to Fandango, while the IMDB rating has a value of 0.63.

Now let me explain all this.

As two variables change, taking different values, they are correlated if there’s a pattern corresponding to both changes. Measuring correlation simply means measuring the extent to which there is such a pattern.

One of the ways to perform this measure is to compute the Pearson’s r. If the value is +1.0, it means there’s a perfect positive correlation, and if it’s -1.0, it means there’s a perfect negative correlation.

The extent to which the variables are correlated decrease as the Pearson’s r approaches 0, from both the negative and the positive side.

Let’s better visualize this:

Now, to put the abstraction above into context, if we compare how the values for two rating types change — say Fandango’s and IMDB’s — we can determine the degree to which there’s a pattern corresponding to both changes.

Given the correlation coefficients just mentioned, there is a pattern between Fandango and IMDB to a greater extent than is for Fandango and the metascore. Both coefficients are positive, and, as such, the correlation is said to be positive, which means that as Fandango’s ratings go up, IMDB’s ratings tend to go up as well, more than the metascores do.

Put differently, for any given movie rating on Fandango, it is more probable that the metascore is going to be more different from it than the IMDB rating.

The verdict: use Metacritic’s metascore

All in all, I recommend checking the metascore whenever you are looking for a movie rating. Here’s how it works, and its downsides.

In a nutshell, the metascore is a weighted average of many reviews coming from reputed critics. The Metacritic team reads the reviews and assigns each a 0–100 score, which is then given a weight, mainly based on the review’s quality and source. You can find more about their rating system here .

Now, I just want to point out a few downsides of the metascore:

• The weighting coefficients are confidential, so you won’t get to see the extent to which each review counted in the metascore.
• You’ll have a rough time finding metascores for less-known movies that appeared before 1999, the year Metacritic was created.
• Some recent movies whose main language is not English aren’t even listed on Metacritic. For example, the Romanian movies Two Lottery Tickets (2016) and Eastern Business (2016) are not listed on Metacritic, while they are on IMDB, with ratings.

Few more words

To sum up, in this article I made a single recommendation of where to look for a movie rating. I recommended the metascore, based on two arguments: its distribution resembles the most a normal one, and it is the least correlated with the Fandango rating.

All the quantitative and the visual elements of the article are reproducible in Python, as it is shown here .

Thanks for reading! And happy movie-going!

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Top 10 Best Movie Review Sites

Of course, this is the biggest, most well-known, and best movie-reviewing website of all time. With hundreds of thousands of votes from random people and critics around the world, you can submit your rating out of ten stars, and it contributes to the final rating. Many movies have over a million ratings and thousands of reviews. You can write your own review, but it is unlikely anyone will get to it as there are so many. The only problem with this website is that there are tens

The best movie reviewing site by far. There are two review sections: for users and for experts.

Some of their reviews are very questionable, but overall this website is okay.

This recently deceased critic has detailed, accurate, and in-depth reviews of practically every movie. He was a very good critic, but as he is just one person you can't exactly say he's better than IMDb, which has over 10 million users.

This website is pretty amazing. It only has one random person who gives the movie a rating out of five stars, with the average being three. The rating is usually inaccurate, so the reviewing aspect of this website isn't great. However, they give a very accurate age rating and a ranking out of five for different categories such as violence and inappropriate content. Users can also give their own rating out of five stars and age rating, though it goes into a different category. This is quite good.

I knew nothing about them before this, but while researching for this list many people seemed to like them. After checking out the website, they seem good.

Ah, I forgot WatchMojo! Thank you to whoever added this to the list.

This website is definitely not for people who just enjoy watching movies for their own sake, but for serious scholarly film buffs. It puts out print magazines that highlight a handful of articles focusing on the different artistic aspects of the movie. Very good, but sometimes a bit boring and maybe not for the average person.

Just an average movie reviewing website. I have nothing negative to say about them, nor anything positive, so they earn a place on here.

5 Best IMDb Alternatives for Free Movie and TV Series Databases

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Here’s Why I Won’t Be Upgrading to the PS5 Pro

5 reasons why i'm not buying the iphone 16 pro, i've been using this secure browser, and it's much better than expected.

The Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, is the world's most popular website and app to look up information about any film or TV show. But it has a few issues. There have been complaints about its rating system not being transparent. The site is owned by Amazon and aggressively promotes Prime Video content. And its famous discussion boards have now been reduced to just another place with unreliable reviews.

But there are free alternative movie databases that give you similar information. Some even let you choose ratings from different places to sort their databases. And fans of the old discussion boards have created better sites for you to chat about what you're watching.

1. TMDB (Web): Ad-Free, Community-Powered, Best IMDb Alternative

TMDB has been around since 2008 and is entirely written and edited by its users, much like Wikipedia. And you won't find any ads or promotions if you register for a free account.

TMDB covers both films and TV series, with a detailed database for alternative titles, cast, crew, descriptions of each episode, runtime, and where it's currently streaming (works in certain countries). You'll also find user reviews and discussions for each entry, but be careful because you might easily come across spoilers. And finally, you can browse any publicly available media about the title, like trailers, posters, set images, and logos.

Registered users can also create personal watchlists to track what to watch or create public lists for others to see and contribute to. In select countries, you can also filter by streaming services to find what's available for you.

You'll find a lot of non-English and regional content on TMDb that you might not easily come across on IMDb, especially for older releases. It's so comprehensive that popular movie trackers like Trakt.TV and Letterboxd use this database. After all, there's a reason we've previously said The Movie Database is the best IMDb alternative out there.

2. All Movie (Web): Old-School & Simple Movie Database

Launched in 1990, IMDb is almost as old as the world wide web. The next oldest movie database is AllMovie, which started in 1998 and still going strong. But while IMDb sports a modern look, AllMovie retains a sense of old-school simplicity and minimalism that is refreshing to browse. And it's only movies on this site, as you won't find TV series.

The main page shows a marquee banner of currently popular films, and you can then browse new and upcoming releases in a box. Two other sections show what's available to stream or buy digital, and current box office earnings. The rest of the site is about browsing by genre, mood, or theme, or using powerful search features to find what you want from its vast Hollywood and foreign films database.

Each title's page furthers the simplicity that AllMovie is known for. The first tab only gives you a synopsis, and then you can read an original review from the site's writers or user reviews. Finally, you'll find cast and crew information or awards it won. AllMovie isn't as comprehensive as IMDb or TMDB in the cast and crew details. Still, it usually covers the more famous or essential aspects of film-making.

3. TV Maze (Web): Comprehensive and Detailed TV Show Database

While AllMovie is for films, TV Maze is for TV series and shows. This site focuses on what's playing on TV channels. And, of course, streaming services count as "channels."

The main page shows today's TV schedule in the sidebar and popular shows airing that day or upcoming season premieres. There's a detailed episode calendar to keep up with TV schedules, and registered users can also include their favorite streaming services. Plus, you can track your favorite series and get reminders whenever an episode is coming out.

TV Maze includes a comprehensive episode and season database for any TV show. You'll find cast and crew information, descriptions of each episode, guest stars, character biographies and appearances, a media gallery, and news.

The website mainly caters to channels or shows in the U.S. or U.K. While there are listings for other countries and shows at times, don't rely on TV Maze for those; instead, find local sites similar to this.

4. MovieChat (Web): Internet's Largest Discussion Boards for Film and TV

In 2017, IMDb announced it was closing its discussion boards, a beloved part of the website for movie fans. After all, each film had its own forum, with multiple sub-topics for fans to talk about different aspects of the movie. One of these fans was Jim Smith. And that's how MovieChat was born.

Like the original IMDb discussion boards, MovieChat gives a sub-forum for every film and TV show. So, if it's on IMDb, you'll find it on MovieChat. And within that sub-forum, you can create and participate in as many threads as possible. But you do have to abide by the community guidelines. And in a frustrating UI experience, you can only sort the threads by latest post, not by popularity.

Nonetheless, these are small sacrifices for the chance to participate in the internet's largest community of film fans talking about what they watched. So it's doubly great when you find out that Smith backed up posts for IMDb's top 10,000 movies and TV shows before the discussion boards were discontinued.

MovieChat is an excellent example of how the internet serves its users even when corporations can't. It's also worth reading Wired's excellent article about Smith's crusade.

5. Big Cartoon Database (Web): Database of All Cartoons Ever Made

What IMDb does for movies, Big Cartoon Database (BCDB) does for cartoons. The website hosts a meticulous record of all cartoons ever made, along with all the information you'd want to know about it.

Whether it's Flintstones or Bugs Bunny, BCDB has the details about any toon. You'll get information about episodes or standalone cartoons, complete with a synopsis of what it's about, the cast and crew who worked on it, production notes, and media if available. You'll also often find links to download the cartoon through Amazon or iTunes.

BCDB also helps you discover cartoons with sections such as top 25 toons, most popular cartoons, or the monthly "hot 100". Or you can browse by studios such as Disney, Pixar, MGM, Warner Bros, etc. Finally, you can also chat with fellow cartoon lovers on the BCDB forums.

Ignore the Ratings

Whether you use IMDb or one of these alternatives, it's probably best if you ignore the rating system. Movie studios, fans, and other biases have crept into the movie-rating methodology. As a result, these ratings are not necessarily a reliable metric of whether a film is good or bad.

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Rotten Tomatoes Alternatives Movie Databases & Movie Review Sites like Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is described as 'And the Tomatometer score are the world’s most trusted recommendation resources for quality entertainment. As the leading online aggregator of movie and TV show reviews from critics, we provide fans with a comprehensive guide to what’s Fresh – and what’s Rotten –' and is a popular Movie Database in the video & movies category. There are more than 50 alternatives to Rotten Tomatoes, not only websites but also apps for a variety of platforms, including iPhone, Android, iPad and Android Tablet apps. The best Rotten Tomatoes alternative is IMDb , which is free. Other great sites and apps similar to Rotten Tomatoes are Simkl , The Movie Database , Letterboxd and JustWatch .

filter to find the best alternatives

• Movie Database
• Free • Proprietary

Rotten Tomatoes and the Tomatometer score are the world’s most trusted recommendation resources for quality entertainment. As the leading online aggregator of movie and TV show reviews from critics, we provide fans with a...

Launched online in 1990 and a subsidiary of Amazon.com since 1998, IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content, designed to help fans explore the world of movies and shows and decide what to watch.

License model

• Freemium • Proprietary

Application types

• Movie Review Site
• Android Tablet
• Kindle Fire
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

IMDb Features

•   User Rating
•   Movie Database
•   Reviews and Recommendations
•   No registration required
•   Where to Watch
•   Dark Mode

IMDb VS Rotten Tomatoes

Comments about imdb as an alternative to rotten tomatoes.

Have IMDb app but not Rotten Tomatoes (RT) so it’s easy to check out movies. Go to RT when I want 2nd review on a film or TV show. IMDB has a more comprehensive site. Lots of lists to investigate.

Most users think IMDb is a great Rotten Tomatoes alternative.

IMDb is the most popular Web-based , Android , iPhone & iPad alternative to Rotten Tomatoes.

IMDb is the most popular free alternative to Rotten Tomatoes.

• IMDb is Freemium and Proprietary Rotten Tomatoes is Free and Proprietary

Simkl is a TV, anime, and movie tracker that keeps a history of all the shows and movies you watch in one, central location. It’s a mobile app, a website, Google Chrome extension to keep track of everything you watch and integrates with many TV apps.

• Anime / Manga Tracking App
• Google Chrome
• VLC media player
• Crunchyroll

Top Simkl Features

•   Track everything
•   Anime / Manga Tracking
•   Automatic tracking
•   Track movies
•   Personalized Recommendations
•   Kodi extension
•   Calendar View
•   Cloud Sync

Simkl VS Rotten Tomatoes

The Movie Database

It's completely user driven by people like you. TMDb is currently used by millions of people every month and with our and powerful API, also used by many popular media centers like Moovida, XBMC, Plex, MythTV and MediaPortal.

Top The Movie Database Features

•   Huge database
•   List Building
•   Lightweight

The Movie Database VS Rotten Tomatoes

Letterboxd lets you keep track of every film you’ve seen, so you can instantly recommend one the moment someone asks, or check reactions to a film you’ve just heard about. We’re a global community of film fans who live to discuss, rate and rank what we watch.

Letterboxd Features

Letterboxd vs rotten tomatoes.

Find out where to watch movies and tv shows legally online with JustWatch. The streaming search engine.

Top JustWatch Features

•   Meta-Search
•   Content Discovery
•   Movie Streaming
•   Aggregator

JustWatch VS Rotten Tomatoes

Metacritic's proprietary Metascore distills the opinions of the most respected critics writing online and in print to a single number.

Metacritic Features

•   Gamification

Metacritic VS Rotten Tomatoes

Reelgood shows you where to find the content you want on the services you need. Just pick out a couple of things-- movies you want to watch, TV shows you're watching-- and Reelgood handles the rest. Streaming made easier, with just a single tap.

• Apple Watch

Reelgood Features

•   Watchlists
•   Custom List Creation
•   Stream video to Apple TV

Reelgood VS Rotten Tomatoes

Ratings, reviews, discussions, recommendations, lists for all media genres: music, movies, tv shows, books, video games, and podcasts. Like IMDb or Goodreads, but with more media types. Join ratehouse to consolidate your entertainment and art interests.

Top ratehouse Features

•   Music Discovery
•   Book Recommendation
•   Wiki-like interface
•   Music Recommendation
•   Community-based
•   Web-Database
•   Book search
•   Movie tracker
•   Tv tracker

ratehouse VS Rotten Tomatoes

Comments about ratehouse as an alternative to rotten tomatoes.

rate.house also has music, books, video games, and podcasts.

• ratehouse is Free and Proprietary Rotten Tomatoes is also Free and Proprietary

lib.reviews

We believe that the information we use to make decisions -- about what book to read, what place to stay at or what product to buy -- will be of higher quality if we organize it transparently, through an open community.

• Free • Open Source
• Review Website
• Self-Hosted

lib.reviews Features

•   Product Reviews

lib.reviews VS Rotten Tomatoes

lib.reviews is the most popular Self-Hosted alternative to Rotten Tomatoes.

lib.reviews is the most popular Open Source alternative to Rotten Tomatoes.

• lib.reviews is Free and Open Source Rotten Tomatoes is Free and Proprietary

The TCI is a measure of the similarity between two people's taste in films. The lower the TCI, the greater the tendency to agree on which movies ruled and which sucked.

Criticker Features

•   Video Game Reviews

Criticker VS Rotten Tomatoes

Comments about criticker as an alternative to rotten tomatoes.

They're independent and their recommendation algorithm is alway right on!

• Criticker is Free and Proprietary Rotten Tomatoes is also Free and Proprietary

Followmy.tv

Followmy.tv is an episode tracker with a social touch. Personal checklist, see what friends are watching, rate, comment, loved, pinned, personal dashboard and much more!

Application type

• Episode Tracker

Followmy.tv Features

•   Modular System

Followmy.tv VS Rotten Tomatoes

TopMoviesLike

Top Movies Like helps you find similar, alternative or related movies to any of your favourite movies instantly. Give it a try!

TopMoviesLike VS Rotten Tomatoes

TopMoviesLike is the most popular Windows & Mac alternative to Rotten Tomatoes.

• TopMoviesLike is Free and Proprietary Rotten Tomatoes is also Free and Proprietary

Letterboxd — Your life in film

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• Start a new list…
• Add all films to a list…
• Add all films to watchlist

Add to your films…

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Add to lists

Take your first step into a larger world…

Sign in or register to get started. We’re your home for logging, rating and reviewing films, your watchlist of titles to see, your source for lists and inspiration, a cast and crew database and an activity stream of passionate film criticism, discussion and discovery.

How Letterboxd works

Tell us what you’ve seen

Get your Letterboxd underway by visiting our Popular section and marking a few films you’ve seen. Click the ‘eye’ on any film poster to tell us you’ve watched it (add a ‘like’ if you liked it and/or a rating). We add all watched titles to your Films tab and then we can show you reviews containing spoilers (usually hidden) and other cool stuff. If you’re Pro we compute detailed stats based on all your watched films (see below ).

Browse your watched films

Now that you’ve added some films, you can find them in the Films tab of your profile. As you add more content, your profile starts to reflect your taste. You can also browse the films of other members, or the community , with Hide watched films activated to find more great films to watch.

If you’ve previously saved film-related activity at IMDb or another service, we can help you import this, too.

Save films to watch later

One of our most-loved features, the Watchlist , lets you keep a list of films you want to see. Start in Most Anticipated and mark a few films you want to see—use the ‘clock’ on a film or review page, or open the options menu on any poster (shown opposite). If you subsequently log or mark a film as watched, we’ll move it from your Watchlist to your Films (and add it to your Diary , if you provide a date—more on that  below ).

Your account, profile and settings

Click your username (at the top of each page) for shortcuts to the main sections of your account. Your Profile , Films , Diary , Watchlist and other pages are here.

You can customize your name, location, website, bio and favorite films in Settings . We use your X / Twitter avatar if you connect your account, or a Gravatar matching the email on your profile.

Note: your profile (and any other content you publish, with the exception of private lists) is visible to others, and to search engines.

Log a film to tell us you watched it on a particular date, and to attach a review, rating and tags. We put all films you log with a date into your Diary , a great reference for when it comes time to compile your year-end list.

You can rate films without logging them too, either on a film or review page, or from the ‘more options’ menu on a poster.

Try logging a film now…

Following and activity

The best way to find members to follow is by reading reviews of films you like, to identify the voices and opinions you dig. Our Members page lists popular accounts.

As you follow more people, we create a personalized Activity stream full of reviews and recommendations from these members (and you’re bound to find new people to follow from the Likes included here). Use the Incoming tab to see who’s interacting with you, and upgrade to Pro to personalize the types of activity you see on each device.

Make and share lists

Lists are a great way to share a collection of related films, or to rank the films of your favorite genre, star, director or franchise. It’s fun to welcome suggestions for your lists from other members.

Start a list on your Lists tab, then add films on the ‘Edit’ screen (or from the ‘more options’ menu on a poster). The first time you make a list public, it’s shared with your followers.

Upgrade for stats + more!

The more films you log on Letterboxd, the more ways we have to analyze your movie-watching habits. Upgrade to a Pro or Patron account and we’ll generate all-time stats based on every film you’ve added to your profile, and annual stats for each year with at least ten films logged.

Stats include overview by week/year, highest rated decades, most watched and highest rated actors and directors, progress against milestone lists, genre, language and country breakdowns, and lots more.

Here’s what you’ll find in our main sections…

If you’re signed in, you’ll see a selection of popular films, reviews and lists from Letterboxd members. As you follow more people, we personalize this page to show what’s popular in your network.

This section shows which films our members are watching and reviewing the most. It’s also your starting point for browsing the whole database, by decade/year, genre, popularity, rating, streaming service and more.

This section shows our most popular lists, and a selection of recently added content. From here you can create a list of your own, browse more popular lists, or browse by the tags applied to each by its creator.

Here you’ll find others whose content is being enjoyed most by our community. Click through to see if you like their style, or locate your real-life Facebook friends that also use Letterboxd.

More tips and tricks

Film actions

On a film or review page, use these controls to tell us you’ve seen (and liked) the film, and how you rated it. Add it to your Watchlist if you plan to see it later. You can also log the film or add it to a list from here.

Tagging films

Adding tags as you log films lets you easily recall them based on any criteria. Tags can be used to encode how, where or with whom you saw a film, or to categorize films by your own genre or content taxonomy.

Reordering lists

To quickly move a film to another position when editing, show List Numbers, then click the number of the entry to move. Type a new position and hit Return. The film will instantly move to that position.

Upgrade to Pro!

Pro accounts unlock additional capabilities: an all-time Stats page and annual Year in Review pages for each year of activity. Filter your activity view, filter film lists by service availability, clone lists and more!

Next up: complete your profile and add some popular films you’ve seen…

Sign in or create an account to get started.

Then grab our apps and see our questions page for more answers.

Import your films

Free to all members. create your own csv file, or import from another service. we support these imdb exports:.

or see our import format documentation

Discover more films

Here’s a selection of our highest rated narrative feature films. the complete list of 250 is maintained by the tireless dave vis. how many have you seen.

or browse our most popular films

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Letterboxd is an independent service created by a small team, and we rely mostly on the support of our members to maintain our site and apps. Please consider upgrading to a Pro account —for less than a couple bucks a month, you’ll get cool additional features like all-time and annual stats pages ( example ), the ability to select (and filter by) your favorite streaming services, and no ads!