u/talyon93

Hey r/Cinephiles!

I'm an Italian dev and I built Cinema Circle, a social platform for cinephiles who want to review, rate and discuss films together with people who actually care about cinema.

The idea: instead of logging films alone on Letterboxd and hoping someone reads your reviews, you join groups of people with similar taste, rate films together after watching, write reviews that get seen by people who watched the same film, and build a shared history of what your group thought of every film over time.

A few cinephile communities are already on it and the discussions there are some of the best film talk I've seen online, no algorithm, no influencer takes, just people who love cinema talking to each other.

Would love to hear what you think, and what film you'd want to rewatch and discuss with a group right now?

Two years ago me and a few friends started doing weekly movie nights. The watching part was easy. The "what do we even watch this week" part was always chaos.

We tried Google Sheets. Voting columns, rating columns, archive of past picks. It worked, technically. But every week one of us had to wrangle the spreadsheet, half the group never opened it, and the whole thing felt like homework.

So I built a small site, just for us. Cleaner, with the stuff we actually used: propose films, vote on what's next, rate after the screening, see who liked what. Then some colleagues saw it and asked "can you make one for our group?". Turns out we're not the only ones with this problem.

Letterboxd is great for solo tracking. Discord is great for talking. But there's no tool built specifically for the group part of movie nights.

So I made Cinema Circle. It's stripped down on purpose, just the things my group actually used week after week. Free, no paywall, still very early (less than 20 active users).

Quick context: I'm an Italian hobby dev, not a filmmaker, just a movie-club regular. The screenshot above is my crew rating Mario Galaxy last week. Half loved it, one called it "boring", one said "if this was the last film I watched it wouldn't be half bad". That's basically what every movie night looks like for us, and that's what Cinema Circle saves and organizes.

I'm posting here because r/FilmClubPH genuinely feels like a movie club community in the real sense, with weekly recommendations and recurring discussions. That's exactly the kind of group I had in mind while building this.

If you want to see what it looks like in practice, a few public communities are open to browse without signup, like the 21st Century Oscar Challenge where members rate every Best Picture winner since 2000.

And if you run a movie night with friends here, you can spin up your own Circle in about a minute, invite your movie buddies, and see if it actually saves you the spreadsheet pain. If a community focused on Pinoy cinema specifically would be of interest, I'd happily help set one up too, no commitment.

Would love honest feedback either way, especially the brutal kind.

cinemacircle.mov