Culture Crash: Love Movies? Why You Should Get On Letterboxd

Do you have a Letterboxd account? Do you know what a Letterboxd account is? In case you don’t know, Letterboxd is an online film cataloging app similar to Goodreads but for tracking movies instead of books. As of January of this year, Letterboxd has more than 17 million users on its site, making lists, giving star ratings, and logging the date they watched films in their diary.

I am, of course, one of those 17 million users, having meticulously maintained my own Letterboxd account since 2016. There are many joys of using an app like Letterboxd or Goodreads, including the amount of discovery they can provide. I’ve spent many a rainy day trolling around Letterboxd, finding users with similar movie tastes as mine and then looking at what their favorite movies are to fill some blind spots in my own viewing history, whether that means seeking out an old noir film or an ‘80s movie from Peter Weir.

Every Letterboxd profile can display four favorites at the top of their page, and the app itself has sent correspondents to film premieres and award shows in recent years to ask actors and filmmakers what their four favorites are. For example Ethan Hawke shouted out Do The Right Thing, Paris Texas, Reds, and All That Jazz, while Ayo Edebiri’s top four includes The Good The Bad and the Ugly, Notting Hill, Phantom Thread, and Babe. I’m not suggesting this is need-to-know knowledge for anyone to have, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it interesting, and if it didn’t make me want to finally see Reds or re-watch Phantom Thread.

And that’s the beauty of Letterboxd, you can go in to log what you just watched and log out with three more things you want to watch soon. 

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