Letterboxd is a wonderful place to be a film fan. It's well-designed, it has a thriving community, and the social experience of logging films, reading pithy reviews, and following friends is genuinely fun. If you love movies, there's a good chance you've spent time there.

But here's something Letterboxd isn't particularly good at: telling you what to watch next.

Say hello to Criticker!

Online since 2005

Criticker was built to solve a specific problem that social film platforms tend to sidestep. With so many loud opinions out there clamoring for your attention, how do you know who to listen to? Where can you go for recommendations that are tailored to you and your unique sensibilities? Criticker helps you discover the movies and shows you're likely to love — based not on general popularity, viral reviews, or what your friends are watching, but on how your preferences align with those of other users.

Recommendations That Actually Know You

On Letterboxd, recommendations come from the crowd: popular lists, trending films, what the people you follow are logging. It's fun and serendipitous. But it's not personalized, at least not in any deep sense.

You can score 0-100 / 0-5 or 0-10

Criticker works differently. When you rate films, the system compares your scores to those of every other user. Over time, it identifies the people whose tastes align most closely with your own. A list is built of the people who watch the same sorts of things you do, and tend to rate them in the same kind of way. From there, Criticker generates Predicted Scores for thousands of films you haven't seen yet — giving you a genuine, data-driven answer to the question "Will I like this?"

That's not something a follower count can tell you. It's something only a smart algorithm, trained on your ratings, can.

Designed for Discovery, Not Just Logging

Where Letterboxd is structured around the social experience of film — logging, lists, reviews, likes — Criticker is structured around discovery. Every rating you add improves your recommendations, and every new prediction opens a path to something you might never have found on your own.

This makes Criticker particularly valuable for:

• Film fans who feel like mainstream popularity doesn't match their taste
• Viewers who want to go deeper than "trending" or "your friends watched this"
• People who enjoy tracking and refining their film preferences over time
• Anyone searching for their next favourite film, not just their next conversation topic

Criticker transforms movie browsing from a passive social activity into an evolving, personalised experience.

Easy to Switch — Bring Your Ratings With You

If you've already logged hundreds (or thousands) of films on Letterboxd, the thought of starting over somewhere new might feel daunting. It isn't. Letterboxd lets you export your ratings directly, and Criticker makes it easy to import them in just a few steps.

https://www.criticker.com/import/

Once your ratings are in, the algorithm gets to work immediately. Soon you'll be looking at a list of users whose taste matches yours, and a personalised queue of films you're predicted to love.

Ready to find out what you'll actually love next?

As a fan of movies, there's a good chance you've heard of the Bechdel Test by now. The deceptively simple three-question checklist has become shorthand for talking about how women show up in film. A film passes the test if (1) it has at least two named women, and (2) they talk to each other, and (3) that is conversation about something other than a man.

https://preview.redd.it/q56m65gaqtdh1.jpg?width=970&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1293c04d9457534d0ae635f257800518ff4b192c

Passing the Bechdel Test doesn't make a movie good, and failing it doesn't make a movie sexist. Some of the most acclaimed, thoughtful films of all time fail it outright, often just because of how a story happens to be structured. For instance, Gravity is focused on a strong, accomplished female character, but she's floating in space alone. And it's also not a measure of how "feminist" a film is; a movie can clear the bar with a throwaway ten-second exchange about the weather.

So, it might be blunt and imperfect, but the Bechdel Test has persisted as a way to understand female representation on screen, because of how easy it is to apply. It doesn't tell you everything, but zoomed out across hundreds or thousands of films, it starts to say something real about which stories get told and how.

At Criticker, there are two collaborative collections focused around the Bechdel Test....

Continue reading on Criticker: https://www.criticker.com/news/criticker-newsletter-13-july-2026/

Christopher Nolan's upcoming epic The Odyssey is getting a closer look in a newly released behind-the-scenes featurette. The video includes comments from Nolan himself alongside cast members Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and Zendaya, while offering new footage from one of the most ambitious productions of Nolan's career.