Letterboxd, the social film review site

Seeing as how I have had a lot of time on my own recently whilst recovering, I decided to sign up for Letterboxd. It’s a site where you can log which films you have watched and when, review them, and see what your friends have watched and reviewed. Letterboxd has been around for some time, and I have been aware of it, but as I don’t watch lots of films I hadn’t bothered signing up. In any case, when I have watched films and wanted to review them, I’ve usually done so on here. Still, I decided it would be useful to have a definitive log of every film I’ve watched, and when, and so here’s my profile. Previously, I’ve used Flixster to log which films I have and haven’t seen, but it seems that Flixster is no more. I’ve also built out some lists on JustWatch, but it doesn’t have the social features of Letterboxd. Those films that I have seen at the cinema have also been logged on Swarm over the years, and so when building out my list of watched films on Letterboxd, I was able to add dates to these. Importing Whilst I built out my profile manually (did I mention I’ve had a lot of time on my own?), if you have built up lists already elsewhere, there are various import tools available. These include sites like iMDB, JustWatch, Rotten Tomatoes and Trakt, as well as apps like Plex. Indeed, if you have your own list that you keep in your notes app, for example, you can simply convert this to a CSV file to import it. Letterboxd Diary and Lists One thing I particularly like about Letterboxd is the ‘diary’ view. I mentioned that you can log when you saw a film, as well as that you have watched it, and those dates all go into a calendar. You can therefore see month-by-month which films you have seen. That should mean that I can list how many films I’ve watched this year when I do my end-of-year quantified review. You can also recruit films onto lists. These were really useful when first setting up – for example, I could search for ‘Marvel’ to get a list of all the Marvel films and be able to mark which of those I had already seen. Social features Letterboxd is designed to be a social network, so you can see what your friends think of films or what they have been watching recently. That being said, it’s a little difficult to find people you already know – it’s not possible to import your contacts, for example. I understand that Letterboxd has allowed you to import connections from Facebook and Twitter in the past, but changes to the APIs of these networks prevents this now. As it stands, Kevin is my only follower there, but you are welcome to follow me as well. It’s worth noting that the range of ‘films’ is pretty wide. As well as the sort of productions you would see at a cinema, you’ll also find various direct to TV productions in there. Indeed, you may notice from the screenshot that this includes many of the recent Doctor Who specials – whilst the usual episodes aren’t there, the slightly longer specials which are not officially in a series are. By including all of these, I have apparently seen 378 films as I write this. Once you have logged and marked some films as having liked them, Letterboxd can start recommending films to you, and you can then add these to a watchlist. Premium accounts Letterboxd is free to use, and free accounts can do most things. However, I decided to pay for a Pro account, as this hides all of the adverts for only around £16 per year. You also get integration with JustWatch, a way of marking whether you own a copy of the film, and additional stats. There’s another paid-for level where you can be a Patron, which includes all of the Pro features and some more. On the whole, I like Letterboxd and plan to carry on logging the films I have watched there. If you are also a member, please feel free to follow me.