Letterboxd News

Block. As mentioned in our Community post, we’ve been working...

matthewb — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:35:00 +1200

Block.

As mentioned in our Community post, we’ve been working on a way to prevent another member from interacting with your Letterboxd account. From today, a ‘Blocking’ facility is available to all members, should you require it.

Each member’s Profile page now sports a flag icon beside the ‘Follow’ button, enabling you to block or report them. Blocking a member means you won’t see their content or actions on any pages we create especially for you on the site, including your homepage and Activity stream. Nor will they be able to comment on (or like) your content.

You may still see the content of a member you’ve blocked in public areas of the site, however if you feel that their content is generally inappropriate or otherwise contravenes our Community Policy, we encourage you to report the account using the ‘Report this account’ option, and let our moderators take appropriate action.

We’re hard at work on more good stuff — details soon.

We almost forgot to mention here that the wonderful folks at...

matthewb — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:22:30 +1200

We almost forgot to mention here that the wonderful folks at Symbolset have added us to their sweet set of social icons. To be on the same page with those other names is a huge vote of confidence, and now there’s no excuse not to link up your Letterboxd profile page from your Tumblr (or wherever).

Community.

matthewb — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:34:00 +1300

As any community grows, its ability to remain on an even keel is likely to be challenged. And while the vast majority of interaction on Letterboxd is respectful and good-natured, we’re aware that from time to time, members have stepped over the line from voicing opinion to lodging personal attacks.

Today, as a first step, we’re introducing new tools to allow the community to help us. We have a plain-English Community Policy which can be summed up in two words: “Be cool”. Every review, list and comment now provides a mechanism to notify our community managers of inappropriate material. Content that steps over the line will be removed, and the responsible party or parties may have their ability to make comments temporarily suspended.

Please use this facility, rather than feeding the trolls! We’ll be following it with the ability to block a member’s comments from appearing in any threads you choose to read. More on that soon.

We have also added (finally!) the ability for members to edit and delete their own comments for a short while after posting, particularly to help with typos or badly formatted HTML. And we’ve made the following improvements:

Added the ability to remove ratings from the Diary page.
Added a link between Director and Actor pages for the same person.
Fixed an issue where the Diary page would show inconsistent rating values between its table and modal (edit) views.
Restored the creation of Activity for reviews that are added to older (existing) Diary entries.
Removed the ability to comment on Diary entries that have no review (unless there’s an existing thread).
Updated the way we post tweets (the previous method was unsupported by Twitter).
Removed some third-party code that was causing problems on Android devices.
Restored the ability to set Favorite Films from the mobile site.
Worked around a Chrome issue that caused the List template to appear misaligned.
Worked around an IE8 issue where the browser would ignore some of the site’s CSS.
Fixed an issue where usernames containing only numerals had inaccessible profile pages.

More. A few more changes today we hope you’ll like… Actor and...

matthewb — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:55:00 +1300

More.

A few more changes today we hope you’ll like…

Actor and director pages now show a photo and bio, if available on The Movie DB. We’ve increased the number of films displayed per page, and if you’re signed in, you can see the percentage of films you’ve seen for the person in question (it updates live as you mark films as watched, just like for lists).
Diary entries made for dates more than two weeks in the past no longer generate activity, which will make it easier on the followers of members with piles of ticket stubs to back-fill.
If you never (or seldom) use half-star ratings, your profile now displays the old five-bar histogram.
The film page now displays your friends’ reviews (if any) ahead of the most popular reviews from all members.
And we’ve fixed a bug that was incorrectly caching Netflix availability data for some members.

Additionally we’ve made one or two other minor tweaks which the eagle-eyed will no doubt spot. Your feedback on these and any other part of the site is welcome, as always.

Oscar.

matthewb — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:07:27 +1300

Happy Oscar day! We’ve just pushed a minor update to the site that addresses the following issues:

Review text edited directly from the Diary page now retains its paragraph formatting.
The Netflix controls in the poster’s Actions menu now behave as expected.
The importer now correctly respects the optional CreatedDate column.
Pro members’ 2012 Year in Review page now correctly displays all likes for films, and the diary count is now correct in all cases.
The popularity algorithm for Lists is now the same as for reviews.

If you spot any problems around these changes, please let us know.

And if you’d like to see how the Oscars would have panned out had our community been casting the votes, we’ve compiled the results for the four main film categories.

Pro. Update The list limits that were part of our original...

matthewb — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 14:03:00 +1300

Pro.

Update The list limits that were part of our original announcement have been removed.

We’re thrilled to announce that after 15 months of public beta, Letterboxd is no longer invitation-only. Today, deep in the Letterboxd HQ bunker, we threw the switch to remove the invitation code requirement during sign-up: Letterboxd is now open to all!

During our invitation-only period we gained 40,000 members, who’ve jointly contributed more than 400,000 reviews, compiled 44,000 lists and added close to 8 million films to their online profiles. Thank you! We are humbled by your enthusiasm. Thanks for helping us to grow and improve Letterboxd, and for letting us become part of your life in film.

We’re really excited about the next steps, as we welcome new members to our community, and continue to improve the site. Which brings us to…

Letterboxd Pro

We’ve heard from many of you that you’d like to be able to support the site, so in the spirit of Maciej Cegłowski’s memorable post on the subject, now you can!

Allow us to introduce Letterboxd Pro. For US$19 per year, Pro members gain access to new features (see below), improved Netflix integration and data importers, and unlimited use of the site; as well as the opportunity to support Letterboxd as we build the best community of film lovers on the web.

We still love our free members. The site will continue to work for you just as before, with one exception: Netflix integration and data importers have both become Pro features. If you joined us during our beta period, your Netflix connection will continue to work.

For our most die-hard fans, we’re also offering a Patron membership level, which will get you listed as a Letterboxd Patron and earn you a drink on us if you’re ever in the vicinity of HQ. We hope you join us by upgrading your account today. If that’s not enough to entice you…

Your year in film

If you enjoyed our 2012 Year in Review, you’ll be pleased to know all Pro members get their own personalized “2012 Year in Review” page like this one.

For members who’ve kept an accurate diary for some or all of 2012, this is a terrific way to present your year in film (and if you haven’t, get cracking!). The page can also be customized with up to six of your own lists. (We’re working on a “Year in Progress” page as well, more on that soon.)

New importer

Our data import facility now supports a simple CSV format described here. In addition to populating lists, you can use the new importer to populate your Films, Diary, Ratings and Reviews pages, by including the appropriate columns in your import file. If any enterprising devs make this work with user scripts for popular services (for example), let us know and we’ll share your handiwork.

Hmmm… upgrades

Today also brings some further changes for all members. Many of you have asked for a way to show your Diary for a particular time period, and from today, you can filter by year, month, day or week (the year filter is in the header, the others you’ll find linked from relevant content in the Diary and elsewhere).

We’ve also added an option to filter your Diary (or Ratings page) by individual star rating, which will assist you in tracking down films you’ve logged but not rated. Check out those unicode URLs!

Based on your feedback, the Review field in the Add a Film panel now expands when focused, for a better writing experience, and the ratings histogram for a film (or a member’s films) now displays all ten possible values, instead of grouping them in pairs.

As always, get in touch if you have any feedback on these changes.

PS. We hate captchas, but they’re a necessary evil, so we’ve made our own based on completing film quotes. You should probably sign out and take a look.

2012.

matthewb — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:18:00 +1300

At the end of our first full year, we thought it might be useful and fun to mine the data you’ve created in order to present a summary of 2012.

Along with collective tallies of diary entries, lists, hours watched and the like, we also processed your ratings (from January 1 to December 21) in order to compute overall rankings for the year across a number of categories. To combat bias from films with smaller numbers of ratings, we used the same formula employed by IMDb for its Top 250 list, which weights films with fewer ratings slightly towards the mean rating for the site. To decide on a minimum number of required votes, we examined the frequency of ratings data and picked a cutoff that includes the top 20% of films rated by the community over the course of the year.

A couple of notes on categories: documentaries are in their own category (so don’t appear in the Highest-Rated Films list). Elsewhere we’ve been a little more stringent in defining genres than the TMDb data allows, especially in the Horror category, which is applied quite liberally. And we’ve removed crossover films between genres too, so animated films don’t appear in sci-fi, for example. Lastly, the popular reviews summary is a selection from our most popular long-form reviews, with films and reviewers only allowed to appear in that section once each.

A slight technical issue today means we’ve removed the poster menus from this page, but we’ll return them as soon as we can. If you want to add these films to your Watchlist, or otherwise interact with them, you can do so from the accompanying lists we’ve created for each category.

A huge thank you from all of us at HQ for the life that you bring to the site every day. We are truly in awe of this community and it continues to delight and amuse us. Have a Merry Christmas, watch some films, and we’ll see you in the new year. We have some great stuff in store.

The 2012 Year in Review in full.

Intermission #2.

matthewb — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:13:00 +1300

Until recently, Polish-born Marcin Wichary could be found at Google, where he spent time in several of the company’s key product groups, and assisted in the creation of many of its best-loved interactive Google doodles. Next year he joins Code for America as a fellow, a position that we trust won’t diminish his capacity for thoughtful, nuanced writing about trips to the cinema.

In reply to one of his many helpful Letterboxd feedback emails, we snuck in a few questions for him.

Self-portrait by Marcin Wichary

What were your early cinema-going experiences like? Was there a seminal equivalent of The Goonies in Poland?
One of my cousins was crazy tall for his age, and he managed to sneak us all into a theatre to watch an uncensored version of Superglina. I was eleven then, and I couldn’t sleep that night, deadly terrified of a bipedal enforcement droid from the movie standing in a doorway behind me, ready to blow me to pieces whenever I moved.

So, yeah, of course I am talking about RoboCop. The tickets were pricey and the theatres far away, so movie-going was reserved for big, impressive productions. All these came from Hollywood, although with baffling, bespoke posters, and equally creative new titles (Superglina means “supercop”, The Terminator was an “electronic assassin”, and Die Hard would translate back to “glass trap”, which of course caused problems with the sequels).

You seem to have an affinity for 80s films in general, judging by their representation in your lists.
I’m fascinated with computer and technology history — particularly the 80s, which is when the general public was introduced to home computers and robots. And while I will forever applaud WarGames for its realism, the romantic scene with Virginia Madsen playing cello against the computer from Electric Dreams, or the most annoying robot ever from Deadly Friend, can tell you just as much about public perception, fears, and hopes involved with new technologies.

I read that you’re a fan of Stanisław Lem. Do you prefer Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Solaris or Soderbergh’s?
I have yet to finish the apathetic former, and I couldn’t get past the latter rewriting so much. But if you’re in love with the source, you can’t really win, can you? The book has a chapter with the protagonist sitting in a doggone library, leafing through academic papers. How on Earth, futuristic or contemporary, can you film that?

Actually, about a year ago, I teamed up with an illustrator to work on a Stanisław Lem Google doodle, which was essentially a five-minute interactive animated movie. It took us forever, and required a lot of really tough decisions I did not expect. If anything, that gave me a lot of respect towards people who squeeze visual narratives out of words for a living.

You’ve famously sought out the landmark building from your favorite film. Do you only stalk inanimate objects?
As a teenager I visited Lem himself once, in his house in Cracow. It was foolish, but arguably rather necessary for my continued well-being. But one of my favorite moments was actually an anti-stalk. A few years back, I was visiting my friend at Industrial Light & Magic (which, if you love movies, is more fun than visiting Hollywood itself). And, in the company store, he starts elbowing me and pointing towards the entrance. Turns out, who else is there, but not George Lucas himself?

My first thoughts on what to do were exclusively restraining order-inviting, but then I realized this was Lucas’s place of work, and I shouldn’t really behave like a common fanboy. So, I just looked at him, and made one very slow, respectful nod. After a second, he did the same. It was pretty legendary. People are still talking about it.

What film is your guiltiest pleasure?
Two-dimensional worlds are easy to love. I can not only watch Rocky IV on repeat, but there is no way for me to get through the ‘No Easy Way Out’ montage without rewinding it a few times.

I mean, hypothetically.

Christopher Livingston wrote recently about the films he’d always watch if he coincided with them on TV. What would make your list?
I suppose all of those movies I don’t remember watching the first time. Or second. The movies that were just always there. Both parts of Die Hard, which Polish TV was fond of playing every Christmas. Some of the Police Academies — cheap and horrible, but my Dad loved them. Tango & Cash (I rounded up different Polish translations once and in typical case of Internet serendipity, someone actually made a master’s thesis out of it later). The Blues Brothers, forever responsible for the Pavlovian humming of the Peter Gunn theme whenever I’m driving in Chicago. And Ghostbusters II, on a grand-grand-grand-copy of a close-captioned VHS tape, which I learned a lot of English from, and I will argue to my death is far superior to the original.

Spielberg or Scorsese?
Meh. Fincher! It was actually through Letterboxd that I realized he must be my favorite director, since I watched all, and liked most of his movies. The making ofs and interviews, the attention to detail, the certain relentlessness toward movie-making he exhibits is very inspiring.

I also have a soft spot for mainstream action directors. Michael Bay, Michael Mann, the late Tony Scott — I don’t actually like very many of their movies, but I admire their body of work and where they’re trying to go with it. On my business card while at Google, my title said “the Michael Bay of doodles”, which was half-hopeful, half-cautionary.

Do you have a favorite Letterboxd review you wish you’d written?
I’m going to pick Morgan Nichol’s review of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol because it’s unpretentious, clever, funny, incisive, and meandering in all the right proportions.

Come to think of it, kind of how I like my movies.

Our thanks to Marcin from his many fans at HQ.

Wow. A quote from Ian Woolstencroft’s review of American Mary...

matthewb — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:56:53 +1300

Wow. A quote from Ian Woolstencroft’s review of American Mary has made it onto one of the film’s promotional posters. Regrettably Ian is not credited as the author of the remark, but we’re chuffed to have contributed to getting his comment out there. Thanks to Scott Weinberg for the tip.

Intermission #1.

matthewb — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 08:36:00 +1300

Somewhere in Scotland — often with the curtains drawn — lives our most prolific member, at least in terms of his tally of films watched. You won’t find much of an online presence for Adam Cook outside Letterboxd, but within the site his depth of knowledge, generosity and authoritative writing style are all on show. We asked Adam a few questions for the first in a series of red-carpet interviews with the people who make Letterboxd great…

Our average user has recorded about 180 films, and you’re close to 10,000 — do you sleep at all?
I’ve had terrible sleep patterns for years which has undoubtedly helped me watch thousands of films whilst most normal people are curled up asleep in their beds. Yet erratic sleep is a price worth paying if it means I get to do what I love and watch new movies.

Melville’s Le Samouraï is clearly an important film for you. It’s your Letterboxd avatar and one of your four favorites, and yet you haven’t reviewed it. Can you talk about what makes it special?
Now that is a tough one to answer without going into great detail but I’ll try. On paper, it is a fairly standard hitman story that we’ve all seen countless times before. However, the big difference between this film and every other hitman movie is that the execution is flawless. Jean-Pierre Melville has made many classics throughout his career, and trying to pick a favorite does a disservice to the others, yet every element of this film is so perfect that it is hard to really look beyond it.

Alain Delon is one of cinema’s coolest actors and this is arguably his most iconic role. He was more than just a clothes horse though, he was also a great actor and you totally buy into the spiraling desperation he feels as his managed and controlled world comes crashing in on his carefully constructed life. Visually the film is a joy to behold, from the slow, lingering cigarette smoke that wafts through the sparse bedroom at the start of the film to the icy-cool nightclub interior; it is the sort of film you could pause at any moment and admire its beauty. Whilst the story isn’t all that original, it is still expertly told as Melville meticulously ratchets up the tension. It is one of those rare films that never puts a foot wrong and for my money it is the finest French film ever made.

You’ll have to wait for a proper review when/if the film gets a Blu-ray release though.

How do you spend time when not watching films?
What, other than spending it on Letterboxd you mean? As sad as it might sound, an awful lot of my free time is spent watching or reading about films but I do enjoy music, writing and long walks on the beach. This answer has just turned into a profile for a dating website, sorry.

Cinema or home theatre?
If it is a good theatre then the cinema wins every time. Sure, they can be expensive these days but there is nothing quite like the communal experience and being enveloped by the large screen and seat-shaking surround sound. Sadly I don’t get to go to the cinema as often as I once did, but I doubt a home theatre experience will ever truly compete (not unless you have a small fortune to spend on the equipment).

Aliens or zombies?
If you’d asked me this question when I was 15, the answer would have been zombies, but these days the undead have become overexposed with an endless stream of forgettable films. Therefore I guess I’ll go with aliens by default.

And finally, do you have a favorite review you wish you’d written?
There are many great reviews from talented writers on Letterboxd (as my own list proves) but I am probably most envious of Lise’s The Thin Red Line review.

Our thanks to Adam for his time and good humor.

Mobile. Since launching our private beta almost a year ago, our...

matthewb — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:12:00 +1300

Mobile.

Since launching our private beta almost a year ago, our most-requested feature (by quite some margin) has been a better mobile experience. Today we’re pleased to announce the first step: a mobile-optimized view of Letterboxd for visitors on handheld devices.

In today’s release, we’ve added optimized templates for most of the site’s key pages, with more to follow. Our approach was to provide as much of the content from the desktop site as made sense in a mobile context, and to streamline the experience by tucking away navigation elements, and by removing a few of the time-saving shortcuts and popups that add enormous value to the desktop site, but tend to slow down a focused mobile workflow.

While we would love to have built a 100% responsive site, this proved something of a challenge within our existing web application framework. Instead, we’ve built a responsive mobile site, which loads automatically on all devices 640 pixels wide or less (you can manually switch between desktop and mobile views in the footer). A key benefit of this approach is that it affords us more control over which elements we include on each page — instead of including a sidebar element and then hiding it in the mobile view, we can subtly alter the markup or omit the element entirely.

We’d like to underscore that this is a first cut. There are areas we plan to further improve as time allows, and a few of the site’s more complex pages, such as the list-editing screen, have not been optimized (but are still accessible as they were).

This release also addresses a few other nagging issues: your user menu now has a direct link to your Diary; rating a film immediately updates the status of the watched flag in the interface (this previously required a page refresh); lists that have notes on one or more films are now highlighted as such; and list editing is improved in Safari.

As always, we welcome feedback on these new additions through the regular channels, and will work to further improve Letterboxd based on your input. Happy viewing!

Risen. In the ten days since its release, Christopher Nolan’s...

matthewb — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 18:53:00 +1200

Risen.

In the ten days since its release, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises has — not surprisingly — occupied the top position in our Popular Films list, accompanied by its two predecessors in the second and third spots. With Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man rounding out the top four, this became the week the superheroes took over the asylum.

The highly-anticipated conclusion to Nolan’s Batman trilogy has divided audiences and drawn criticism even from those who loved his second instalment. The Letterboxd community has been generally positive in its feedback, with an overwhelming majority of the 2,250 ratings for the film so far being four stars or higher.

At the positive end of the spectrum, Mr DuLac praised the inclusion of elements from classic Batman comics, calling the film “surprisingly character-driven”, Travis Lytle described it as “tense, emotional and gripping … full-bore, grand-scale entertainment”, and Chris Davis loved the director’s “clear and innovative vision”. Mark Kinsella neatly summarises the general sentiment:

It doesn’t reach the anarchic heights or the thought-provoking themes of The Dark Knight and at times it seems to be struggling with too much plot, but The Dark Knight Rises is an exciting and emotionally fueled denouement to one of the greatest film trilogies of all time.

Further down the rating scale, various reviewers criticised the film for its “bland and derivative” set pieces, poor staging, misplaced character motivations and lazy exposition.

Marcin Wichary’s three-star review begins with a fantastic relationship analogy and goes on to deliver a typically thorough dissection of the film’s flaws and general weirdness. Marcin saw the film as part of a back-to-back screening of the complete trilogy; his reviews of parts one (★★★★) and two (★★★★½) are also worthy of your time.

At the lower end of the scale, Adam Cook found little to like, and while Ryan’s 4,500-word excoriation of the film made some stout points, it ultimately failed to move much beyond the implausible nature of the plot, to which Dean Sherriff had the best response:

Mate, it’s a movie about a billionaire philanthropist who, after training with a secret society of ninjas, decides to dress up as a bat and fight criminals one at a time using only his wits, fists and a utility belt. … It’s a FANTASY film and liberties of logic have to be allowed.

We’ve loved watching the reactions to this film unfold on the site, the good, the bad and the downright ugly. Keep them coming!

We’d be remiss not to mention our dismay over the tragic events in Aurora, Colorado, nor the reverent words and actions of Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale and others associated with the film following the incident.

May.

matthewb — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:15:18 +1200

Today’s release includes changes and enhancements in a number of areas. Thanks for all your continued feedback on the site; while we can’t answer everyone, we do read and consider all your suggestions.

The auto-complete facility when adding a film has been upgraded to return exact matches first, and also now matches on the original name and alternative name fields we get from TMDb. We’ll be rolling out an improved site search shortly, with better prioritisation of relevant matches.

When viewing a list, signed-in users will see the percentage of the list they’ve marked as watched in the right column. This figure updates live as you change the watched toggle for any film on the list page. We’ve also moved the location of the ‘Like’ button into the actions panel, to make it more consistent with the rest of the site.

When editing a list, you can now change item numbers in-place, to move items to a new position in the list. We’ve also fixed a caching bug which failed to update numbering following list editing.

We’ve added display and browsing of TMDb’s list of genres from a film’s page. They’re fairly broad with lots of overlap, but it’s a good start. We’ll be adding a tab for other crew members, including writers, in the near future.

Your profile page now shows both recent and popular reviews, in order to keep its content ticking over a little more frequently.

The lists, views and likes pages for a film can now be filtered using the You/Your Friends/Everyone switch. This means you can check which of your own lists a film is in, for example, a feature we had several requests for. These pages are accessed from the individual count icons below the poster on the film’s page.

Public.

matthewb — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:09:00 +1200

Today we’re pleased to announced our transition from private to public beta. All pages on Letterboxd are now publicly visible (except for those deemed private by their owners), and all new users are able to send invitations to friends immediately following sign up. Letterboxd will remain invitation-only for a period, to enable us to control our rate of growth.

In the six months since launching at Brooklyn Beta, we’ve attracted more than 17,000 beta testers, who have collectively written some 80,000 reviews, compiled close to 10,000 lists and added over 2 million films to their online diaries.

The amount and quality of feedback received during the private beta period has been overwhelming. Our users have proven to be engaged, lucid and passionate about film, which we love. Most of all, they love spending time on the site — the top third of users spends over ten minutes every time they visit, and this is reflected in the number of pages we’ve served to account holders: over a million per month in March and April.

The private beta period also gave us an opportunity to refine our service, and to add new features: a new diary view, the People page, popularity sorting options, an incoming activity stream, importing of ratings and lists from IMDb and Delicious Library, Netflix integration (import viewing history, add to instant queue and filter watchlist by Netflix availablility), and Twitter and Facebook friend finders. Today we’ve added another useful toggle that allows you to temporarily hide films you’ve seen (while browsing poster grid views), and introduced a small amount of display advertising (let us know if you have something to share with our users).

The public beta period will be used to further grow the Letterboxd community, to improve our mobile experience and to deliver a public API for third-party interaction. Now that we’re live to the public, we’d love you to share your profiles, reviews and lists (or any other page) across your existing networks.

Happy watching.