And a bit of a follow up question because I want to complain a bit, why does it feel like most movie recommendation websites suck?
I second the opinion on finding a critic or reviewer you agree with. I follow a few on YouTube. Search for reviews on stuff you’ve seen, both for good and bad shows, so that you get an idea of how they think and what they value
I just grab whatever gets a scene release on my preferred piracy site, provided that it does not involve superheroes or something else that has saturated screens for the past 15 years. And when I find myself on an airplane I look through what I have on my portable USB drive and pick something, mostly at random, because I like knowing as little as possible about a movie before watching it, to the point where I consider trailers to be spoilers.
Every movie recommendation website sucks in their own way … which is why one way of dealing with it is to average them all out.
When my wife and I do a search we’ll first find a film that was recommended by a friend, site, forum, wherever … then do a quick search in rotten tomatoes, IMDb, Google and Letterboxd … we do a quick round up of all the sites reviews based on how many reviews and by who (audience and critics) … then we do some quick mental math and come up with an average rating ourselves. It works most of the time but at a better rate than anyone one recommendation site.
Then if we get frustrated, we watch a classic old film. If you rewatch an old film from 30 years ago, it’s like watching it again for the first time. Well not exactly but do you remember all the details of a movie you watched 20, or 30 years ago.
Still up for better alternatives.
But for now I’ve been using TheMovieDb.Then use the
Filterssection:- Select
Genresyou want to watch - Set
User Scorebetween7 - 10 - Set
Minimum User Votesto50 - Alter the
Filtersmore if you desire - Click
Search
For power users, I recommend to use a plugin like NoScript though, to block Google/CookieLaw’s hidden JS spyware on the site (they’re on 2/3th of the web tho).
Beware, NoScript will break some sites,
and will require you to manually enable/whitelist JS (JavaScript) sources for sites + CDNs to fix this again.Noscript is necessary for modern web browsing
- Select
Trakt (Website)
NZB360 (Android App)
Anything I find along the way on Lemmy/Internet/RedditWatching trailers and seeing if the film might appeal to me.
I’ve never really used it for movies and it can recommend more than just movies but I’ve used TasteDive before, if you haven’t already tried that one.
Mostly Letterboxd
Have you tried https://movielens.org/? I’ve found some great recommendations there
It appears to require an account though?
Which I call a downside for privacy concious users.It just needs an email address, and it needs to remember who you are, otherwise how could you use it? In movielens you thumb movies up and down and over time it predicts movies it thinks you’ll like. It’s run by the University of Minnesota
JustWatch does a good enough job for me.
I can see a lot of spyware on that site through NoScript.
If you use this site without blocking JS components then following parties will be spying on what you click, to sell it to the best bidder:
- TikTok
- SnapChat
And what if I use uBlock?
Refresh my Tumblr dashboard and watch the first thing I see giffed.
Rocco’s Animal Trainer #2
YouTube is where I get my movie recommendations. I follow a lot of film channels
imdb or rottentomatoes sorted by user, not critic, ratings. Also ignore all ratings past ~2015, as they are gamed.
I don’t. I download everything and watch trailers. With glances of critic/audience scores.