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How do you find new movies to watch?
Lately I’ve been watching movies every night, after many years of only rarely watching them. There are a lot of mediocre websites to find movies. What do you use? Who are your favorite critics?
Basically through Letterboxd. If I see a movie I like, I see if the director have made other interesting movies I can add to my watchlist. Letterboxd also has all kinds of lists integrated like the Sight & Sound top list, various best rated according to IMDB, box office, Letterboxd user highest rated and so forth. I also look at award winners from Cannes. Criterion Channel is also good at curating their recommendations into various topics and every month they release a new batch of movies where I always find something I find interesting.
I watch the Criterion Closet videos and then branch out from there with directors or similar-themed films. So for a while I was watching godzilla movies and Giallo movies. From there I dipped into samurai movies and now im kinda just going through some of the great directors from back in the day.
A couple of different places. Sometimes I'll be browsing through forums online, like tildes, and come across someone mentioning a new show or movie that sounds like something I would watch (shout out to the weekly what have you been watching/playing/reading/etc threads on here). Or maybe I'm just swiping through my youtube shorts feed and one of them is a scene from an old movie and it catches my interest.
What really helps is having a list on my phone that I can quickly add to at any moment. Then when I feel like watching something but don't know what, I can easily pull up a list of movies that have already passed the 'does this look interesting enough' check. This is much better than the alternative where you feel in the mood to watch something, but don't know what, so you pick your favorite streaming network and just browse through stuff aimlessly. Because in that scenario, you still have to determine the very basic 'does this look interesting enough that I can see myself devoting 2 hours to it? whereas with my list, I already have a curated selection of movies (and games, and shows, and books, etc) that I know sounded appealing to me in the past, for one reason or another.
It’s somewhat surprising to me that rogerebert.com is still one of the better places to go for movie reviews, even though the new reviews are written by other people. It reminds me of “tribute” jazz performances where relatively unknown musicians trade on the names of famous musicians who died long ago. I guess it’s hard for critics to make a name for themselves?
My local library has a lot of DVDs that can be borrowed for free. They also have some for purchase for under a dollar. More are added pretty frequently. So every few weeks we browse through those, and if something looks interesting we check a few reviews online to see if it’s worth it.
I scraped reddit comments a while ago and made this list of about 20,000 lines. Some of these lines aren't movie titles but a lot are:
https://unli.xyz/cinema.txt
I did something similar for music as well:
https://unli.xyz/music.txt
Both lists are sorted randomly and I recommend sorting it randomly again to maximize our communal entropy...
But a lot of these films have limited distribution. MUBI is a good platform for curated movies.
Mostly from recommendations from here on Tildes and from friends, and from watching trailers on YouTube. I subscribe to a bunch of studios/production companies channels, like A24, Netflix, Prime Video, Marvel Entertainment, Pixar, etc. And the YouTube algorithm seems to have gotten the hint, so keeps presenting me with interesting trailers from other companies I am not subscribed to too.
I also use Trakt.tv to track my own watch history/manage my watch lists, and it also has a pretty decent Discover page, and a Search feature that can be filtered by streaming service, genres, maturity rating, language, country of origin, studio, release date range, runtime range, and review scores from various sites, which make it great for discovering new stuff. They also have user created Lists that can be searched for, and also show up at the bottom of every show/movie page, which I have occasionally perused for more recommendations as well. Although, ironically, their actual "Recommendations" feature, which shows up at the bottom of the Dashboard page, is the least helpful for finding new stuff, IMO. :P
https://agoodmovietowatch.com and Letterboxd are nice for a some suggestions.
The RedLetterMedia-guys on YT sometimes suggest interesting movies I wouldn't come across otherwise.
For new releases I mostly check 🏴☠️ streaming sites, and just look them up on Letterboxd and the IMDB.
And I quite often check the movies of specific directors/actors on the IMDB, and bookmark the interesting ones for later.