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Sign in or register to get started. We’re your home for logging, rating and reviewing films, your watchlist of titles to see, your source for lists and inspiration, a cast and crew database and an activity stream of passionate film criticism, discussion and discovery.

How Letterboxd works

Tell us what you’ve seen

Get your Letterboxd underway by visiting our Popular section and marking a few films you’ve seen. Click the ‘eye’ on any film poster to tell us you’ve watched it (add a ‘like’ if you liked it and/or a rating). We add all watched titles to your Films tab and then we can show you reviews containing spoilers (usually hidden) and other cool stuff. If you’re Pro we compute detailed stats based on all your watched films (see below ).

Browse your watched films

Now that you’ve added some films, you can find them in the Films tab of your profile. As you add more content, your profile starts to reflect your taste. You can also browse the films of other members, or the community , with Hide watched films activated to find more great films to watch.

If you’ve previously saved film-related activity at IMDb or another service, we can help you import this, too.

Save films to watch later

One of our most-loved features, the Watchlist , lets you keep a list of films you want to see. Start in Most Anticipated and mark a few films you want to see—use the ‘clock’ on a film or review page, or open the options menu on any poster (shown opposite). If you subsequently log or mark a film as watched, we’ll move it from your Watchlist to your Films (and add it to your Diary , if you provide a date—more on that  below ).

Your account, profile and settings

Click your username (at the top of each page) for shortcuts to the main sections of your account. Your Profile , Films , Diary , Watchlist and other pages are here.

You can customize your name, location, website, bio and favorite films in Settings . We use your X / Twitter avatar if you connect your account, or a Gravatar matching the email on your profile.

Note: your profile (and any other content you publish, with the exception of private lists) is visible to others, and to search engines.

Log a film to tell us you watched it on a particular date, and to attach a review, rating and tags. We put all films you log with a date into your Diary , a great reference for when it comes time to compile your year-end list.

You can rate films without logging them too, either on a film or review page, or from the ‘more options’ menu on a poster.

Try logging a film now…

Following and activity

The best way to find members to follow is by reading reviews of films you like, to identify the voices and opinions you dig. Our Members page lists popular accounts.

As you follow more people, we create a personalized Activity stream full of reviews and recommendations from these members (and you’re bound to find new people to follow from the Likes included here). Use the Incoming tab to see who’s interacting with you, and upgrade to Pro to personalize the types of activity you see on each device.

Make and share lists

Lists are a great way to share a collection of related films, or to rank the films of your favorite genre, star, director or franchise. It’s fun to welcome suggestions for your lists from other members.

Start a list on your Lists tab, then add films on the ‘Edit’ screen (or from the ‘more options’ menu on a poster). The first time you make a list public, it’s shared with your followers.

Upgrade for stats + more!

The more films you log on Letterboxd, the more ways we have to analyze your movie-watching habits. Upgrade to a Pro or Patron account and we’ll generate all-time stats based on every film you’ve added to your profile, and annual stats for each year with at least ten films logged.

Stats include overview by week/year, highest rated decades, most watched and highest rated actors and directors, progress against milestone lists, genre, language and country breakdowns, and lots more.

Here’s what you’ll find in our main sections…

If you’re signed in, you’ll see a selection of popular films, reviews and lists from Letterboxd members. As you follow more people, we personalize this page to show what’s popular in your network.

This section shows which films our members are watching and reviewing the most. It’s also your starting point for browsing the whole database, by decade/year, genre, popularity, rating, streaming service and more.

This section shows our most popular lists, and a selection of recently added content. From here you can create a list of your own, browse more popular lists, or browse by the tags applied to each by its creator.

Here you’ll find others whose content is being enjoyed most by our community. Click through to see if you like their style, or locate your real-life Facebook friends that also use Letterboxd.

More tips and tricks

Film actions

On a film or review page, use these controls to tell us you’ve seen (and liked) the film, and how you rated it. Add it to your Watchlist if you plan to see it later. You can also log the film or add it to a list from here.

Tagging films

Adding tags as you log films lets you easily recall them based on any criteria. Tags can be used to encode how, where or with whom you saw a film, or to categorize films by your own genre or content taxonomy.

Reordering lists

To quickly move a film to another position when editing, show List Numbers, then click the number of the entry to move. Type a new position and hit Return. The film will instantly move to that position.

Upgrade to Pro!

Pro accounts unlock additional capabilities: an all-time Stats page and annual Year in Review pages for each year of activity. Filter your activity view, filter film lists by service availability, clone lists and more!

Next up: complete your profile and add some popular films you’ve seen…

Sign in or create an account to get started.

Then grab our apps and see our questions page for more answers.

Import your films

Free to all members. create your own csv file, or import from another service. we support these imdb exports:.

or see our import format documentation

Discover more films

Here’s a selection of our highest rated narrative feature films. the complete list of 250 is maintained by the tireless dave vis. how many have you seen.

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Letterboxd is an independent service created by a small team, and we rely mostly on the support of our members to maintain our site and apps. Please consider upgrading to a Pro account —for less than a couple bucks a month, you’ll get cool additional features like all-time and annual stats pages ( example ), the ability to select (and filter by) your favorite streaming services, and no ads!

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Meet the Superusers Behind IMDb, the Internet’s Favorite Movie Site

By the time Les Adams arrived in Eastland, Texas, in the 1960s, he was about 50 years late for the town’s oil boom. But Adams came searching for another kind of treasure. He had received a tip from his former boss at a bowling alley, a politician named Preston Smith, that a printing company in Eastland was changing up its business. For years it had been a major source of promotional materials for the movie industry, but it was moving on to a new market in restaurant menus. The company, Smith said, had some leftover pressbooks—brochures created by film distributors to market new flicks—that might interest Adams. Bearing a handwritten note from Smith, Adams found the owner, Victor Cornelius, at his office on Main Street. “I still don’t know what Preston told Victor,” Adams told me. “But I do know I ended up getting the pressbooks. He had them upstairs in a blocked-off room—shelves and shelves. It started in 1930, in alphabetical order.” Adams borrowed a pick-up truck and made five trips, ferrying three decades of film history to his own collection of memorabilia back in Lubbock, about a four-hour drive away. “I was buried in paper,” he recalled.

Victor Cornelius’ company became one of the largest menu-printing outfits in the country. Preston Smith became the 40th governor of Texas. But Les Adams would become a leader in something arguably even grander and farther-reaching.

For the next three decades, Adams spent his spare time expanding his collection and his expertise on film, particularly cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s. Then in 1999 Adams learned about a place on the still-new World Wide Web that could hold all that knowledge. His first impression of the Internet Movie Database wasn’t favorable—“an ugly orchard filled with low-hanging fruit”—but he also saw that it had potential to be “the only site that was a one-stop place for movie researchers and historians.” He decided to pitch in on the crowdsourced project. 

Adams, now 88, has since written almost 7,000 plot summaries for films listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). In total, he’s contributed more than 890,000 pieces of information about film and TV, a chunk of which came straight from the files he hauled from Eastland. “If data was weighable,” he told me, “the IMDb owes a small ton of  thank you kindly, sirs to Preston Smith and Victor Cornelius. I was only the messenger.”

Yet Adams’ extensive additions to the database make him only the 41st-most-prolific contributor , as of early 2023. Someone else has written over 35,000 plot summaries; another is credited—somewhat controversially—with a staggering total of 22 million items. Contributions can range from correcting an errant punctuation mark to writing a biography of a new actor.

Although there are over 83 million registered users of IMDb in the world, only a small fraction of those ever add information to it. That group includes actors adding their own credits; production companies filing content for their productions; and most of all, individual volunteers contributing wherever they see fit. The top 300 contributors—from Brazil, India, Germany, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, and the US, among others—are memorialized annually in the site’s Hall of Fame for the extraordinary amounts of time and energy they spend helping build the preeminent reference source for film and TV. Beyond that, they don’t get public recognition; they are largely pseudonymous and don’t divulge much about themselves on the site. They don’t get paid, either. (Adams says he once received an IMDb tie pin.) And yet their contributions have an incalculable reach across the web—viewed by millions on IMDb, repurposed on Wikipedia and  TikTok , copied into movie event listings, cited in scholarly articles. 

In an era when many have become pessimistic about the state of the internet, Wikipedia is often  held up as a rare miracle of collaborative, crowdsourced knowledge-gathering for the public good—a lonely holdout for the early web’s utopian ideals. But IMDb has been doing much the same for five years longer than Wikipedia. And its success and longevity are an arguably weirder phenomenon. It is sourced from a crowd, but a crowd where everyone works alone. It’s a grassroots project, and yet it’s owned by one of the biggest companies in the world. It’s a repository of knowledge premised on the idea of giving credit where credit is due—but its own story is less frequently acknowledged.       

Debating the relative hotness of celebrities is an enduring adolescent pastime—and sometimes the kernel of a 30-year-old web giant. On a Usenet group in 1989, someone started a thread to discuss which actresses where the most attractive. Someone else turned that thread into a list of actresses and their movies; someone else organized and distributed updated versions to the group every month as “THE LIST.” Another member started a living actors list, then a dead actors list (hotness no longer essential). Someone else started a directors list. In October 1990, a British programmer and film buff named Col Needham, who was involved in the project, published a script—code, not a screenplay—that allowed users to search all the lists, thus launching the first version of the Internet Movie Database. Dozens more volunteers, plus two universities, supported the creation and management of more lists and the infrastructure to contribute to, manage, and access the data. In 1996, Needham and his associates incorporated IMDb as its own business and moved to imdb.com, with entries for over 65,000 films and a lofty  mission “to capture any and all information associated with movies from across the world.” 

That may not sound like such an audacious mission today, but this was two years before Google officially launched with its quest to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and five years before Wikipedia. Access to free, endless information was a revelation, rather than an expectation. If you wanted to know something, you also needed to know where to look—the right reference book, magazine back catalogs, or, perhaps, pressbook archive. IMDb crammed it all together and offered film obsessives and casual moviegoers alike a single place to find it. And it did so as a rare hybrid between a user-driven cooperative enterprise and a commercial product. Amazon bought IMDb in 1998 and supercharged the reach of its content, but its film-buff knowledge-production skunkworks remained largely  untouched .

IMDb’s emergence almost cost Gary Brumburgh a decade of his life. Brumburgh had spent the 1980s researching and writing a reference book covering a thousand actors, all while struggling to make it in Hollywood himself. The moment he visited IMDb for the first time, he realized that his literary project, at least, didn’t have a future. “I was so depressed because IMDb had just kind of taken my book and it was obsolete now,” he told me. But after his initial disappointment, he found a new purpose for all that work: For over two years, Brumburgh would come home from his day job with the County of Los Angeles and put in another five hours writing and submitting mini-bios to IMDb (although not one  for himself ). “It was obsessive,” he says. “I shut myself off from people for a long time, but I got done what I felt I needed to do.” 

Brumburgh’s obsession has made him the third-most-prolific IMDb biographer of all time, with over 1,200 bios, prose pieces covering a subject’s life and career that sometimes approach a thousand words. He’s chronicled plenty of folks on the A-list, including Clive Owen, Forest Whitaker, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Hudson, John C. Reilly, Kathy Bates, Mark Ruffalo, and Tilda Swinton. The bulk of his contributions, however, are bios of actors from the 1930s to ’50s and lesser-known actors from more recent eras. “I wanted the younger people who are involved in IMDb to know who these actors were back then and not just to forget about them,” says Brumburgh, who’s now 72, retired, and singing jazz in Nashville. Although IMDb broke his book, his subsequent contributions to the site helped him find gigs as a writer for movie magazines like  Films of the Golden Age and  Classic Images . All told, things worked out: “I love IMDb. I’m on it constantly,” he says. 

Brumburgh’s botched book project and five-hour-a-day habit may be unique, but his explanation for what motivates him is not. Like other so-called supercontributors, he believes he’s working in service to an art form and everyone who sees it. Completeness and accuracy are a source of pride.

As of December 2022, IMDb contained pages for over 625,000 movies and over 230,000 TV series. The site now also includes reference information on podcasts, music videos, and video games, plus trailers, original content, showtimes, and watchlists. In total, these pages hold over 484 million pieces of data, from a lengthy synopsis of a movie to its exact run time. 

Anyone who opens an IMDb account can submit additions and edits to the site. But not all submissions are equal. The site is governed by a  Contributor’s Charter , as well as  109 instructional guides , from how to list  countries (origin of financing, not location of filming) to whether wigs are part of the  costume department (they’re not). Contributions are reviewed by IMDb, though the company is opaque when it comes to what exactly that process entails. A representative for IMDb wouldn’t share how many moderators and editors are employed by the site, nor the extent to which they may gather or revise content themselves—only that they “have teams and mechanisms for reviewing data to ensure it’s as accurate and reliable as possible.”

At least some of those staff, as well as CEO Col Needham, are also active in the IMDb Community Forums, where the contribution system itself gets continually scrutinized and is often revised through complaints, suggestions, and debate. The  section of the forum dedicated to “Data Issues & Policy Discussions” is far and away the most active, with almost 40,000 conversations. One popular post seeks support to “MAKE THE UNIT PUBLICIST AN IMDB JOB CATEGORY” rather than lump the role in with “Additional Crew.” A typical staff  announcement explains that the site is now able to appropriately categorize podcast series submissions after a successful beta test with contributors. These public negotiations about the very functioning of the site demonstrate the careful balance supporting its model: It should allow as many new contributors as possible but also encourage some of them to contribute prolifically. The top 10 users successfully submitted 22,910,419 items last year, or nearly 5 percent of all data items that exist on the site. To make it on the end-of-year leaderboard of top contributors, a user needed to have produced at least 17,000 entries.    

Contributors have varied tastes and areas of expertise, ranging from punctuation to Indian soap operas—and it is those interests, more than any company plan, that dictate how the data on IMDb expands and changes each year. Les Adams, the Texan with the pressbooks, estimates that his crusade to fix incomplete non-American distributors of American films probably got him on the 2003 Top Contributor list. Christian is an editor and translator in Spain and the man behind Pegg1976, the sixth all-time contributor to IMDb by the end of 2022. He’s made almost 3 million contributions, correcting errors that other users make and IMDb overlooks: accents, capitalization, and, particularly, character names. 

Other supercontributors work to ensure that content from their country gets its due on the site. Dibyayan Chakravorty, a 31-year-old engineer in Kolkata, India, began adding to IMDb when he saw how little Indian content had detailed information. (He’s since pivoted to become the most popular author of IMDb polls of all time.) Miriam Vazquez Fraga, a journalist who’s 17th on the all-time contributor list, was a student when she began adding information about Spanish television shows and their actors in her spare time. And for every Dibyayan and Miriam, there’s someone else committed to covering, say, Romanian actors or Filipino films.

A few contributors are called to even more esoteric fields. When Joe Wawrzyniak is not working his retail job in New Jersey, he’s trying to find information on the masses of film pros who never had their name in lights—or anywhere, really. Early stunt actors , niche horror writers ,  dog actors . “It’s a lot of fun and quite a challenge digging up info on these people,” he told me. He’s the all-time leader in biographies, having written over 3,000 of them. To get information on the lesser-knowns, Wawrzyniak is enmeshed in niche online communities and Facebook groups for film and TV, like one for 1980s extras, where he can contact actors and confirm details. 

Ulf Kjell Gür digs through film archives in Scandinavia and Germany in search of forgotten filmmakers who haven’t been documented online. If he’s trying to cover a filmmaker’s whole career, he says he will “even trouble their friends and enemies, try to get to know something about these people, because they mean something to me.” The 70-year-old Swede, who used to work in theater, estimates he now spends six hours a day on contributions: watching films, taking notes, reading scripts, and writing plot summaries and mini-bios for IMDb. He’s seen over 6,000 features, but he finds there’s an extra pleasure in detailing the backgrounds of films that send him on the hunt. “It’s what really gets me going,” he says. “It’s like a drug.” 

Even if they’re not scouring Stockholm’s Royal Library or hauling pressbooks across Texas, most of IMDb’s supercontributors are pouring hours of work into the site. Writing a cogent biography of an actor or filmmaker can be both an extensive research project and an exercise in restraint; producing a clear recap of a show or movie is a core job responsibility of today’s magazine culture writers. At the very least, most are watching the movies and TV they’re adding data for—the supercontributors I interviewed watch two or more movies a day.

They aren’t, however, watching together.

Unlike superusers of other websites, the supercontributors of IMDb are not motivated by or engrossed in an online community. Of those I spoke to, only Dibyayan had ever sought connections with other IMDb contributors. And the site is not designed to make them: Users have scant profiles, and you can’t direct-message them. Where IMDb may be a cumulative project, it is not a collective one. A Wikipedia page on Martin Scorsese is the product of thousands of edits and no single author; his IMDb biography has a byline with a single username. These are outcomes of the contribution system, which, much like the site’s embryonic formats, is not a network—it’s a scatter of nodes, each managing their own list or toiling in their own genre, connected directly to the core. IMDb’s model has worked because that system successfully capitalized on a more abstract kind of connection: the solidarity of fandom. The supercontributors may not know one another or like any of the same things, but they want to serve fans like them and, perhaps, help create new ones.

Ines Pape may be the most prolific IMDb contributor of all time. None of the supercontributors I interviewed knew who the user inespape-1 was, nor had they ever been in touch. IMDb did not respond to a question about their identity. I chased a pseudonym through the innocent Ines Papes of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to no avail. Ines Pape may not be one person at all: With over 22 million total contributions—and over 3.6 million last year alone, averaging nearly seven submissions per minute—they are, at the very least, not merely a human enterprise. Supercontributors can make the Hall of Fame by writing prose, but to take the top spot they have to write code.

While Ines Pape’s methods aren’t known, last year’s number one contributor told me how he made it to the top. Simon Lyngar began adding to IMDb after he visited the site to rate Norwegian titles, only to find that no page for them existed. As a programming student, he quickly recognized that he could automate contributions to the submission form, saving himself one kind of labor while creating a new venue for testing his skills. He wrote programs to draw data, particularly podcast data, from Spotify and Norwegian state broadcasting APIs and submit them to IMDb. Now, he says, “I can start my program in the morning, it will do everything on its own, and when I come home from university I have 100,000 more contributions to my name.” Under the name  Nomissimon10 , his 8,924,424 contributions in 2022 earned him first place in the year’s rankings. 

That doesn’t sit well with some contributors, who take to the community forums to  debate automation. They see it as an illegitimate tactic for climbing the leaderboard. “I think a lot of them don’t understand the amount of time put into making the program in the first place and the consistency it provides in its contributions,” Lyngar said. “After all, we all just want IMDb to have more data to fill its users’ needs.” 

IMDb as a company doesn’t currently scrape any information itself, but it’s hard to imagine an Amazon subsidiary that would pass up these tools as they prove their value. Maybe uploading titles, cast and crew lists, and production details won’t be crowdsourced to humans for long. Nonetheless, even the vanguard of AI isn’t ready to watch new titles and describe them. You can ask ChatGPT to write a plot summary of an imaginary television show, but if you ask it to summarize Fleishman Is in Trouble , it’ll tell you that’s only a book. The miniseries premiered in 2022, months after the cutoff for the bot’s training data. Perhaps a future model will be better able to stay on top of the current discourse, but even the smartest AI can’t find the kind of data supercontributors track down in the physical world, on rare film reels and in dusty collections. As long as there’s offline film history to be brought online, or new but neglected content, there’s a role for people who care enough to memorialize it. 

And as long as IMDb supercontributors want to make the database as exhaustive as possible, the ceaseless production of new movies, TV shows, and podcasts means their work will never actually be complete. The sheer scale is one thing. Human fallibility is another: Les Adams calls IMDb “the most accurate source of film data and, at the same time, the most error-ridden source of film data.” Even if every title of the past were to become perfectly documented, every new piece of content pushes completion just out of reach. A Usenet list and a few dozen tech-savvy film nerds couldn’t keep up; nor can a global corporation managing a website with millions of users making millions of contributions. But there remains the aspiration of contending with everything everywhere all at once, and finding meaning in that challenge. 

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Launched online in 1990 and a subsidiary of Amazon.com since 1998,  IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content, designed to help fans explore the world of movies and shows and decide what to watch.

Our searchable database includes millions of movies, TV and entertainment programs and cast and crew members. 

IMDb can help you:

• Jog your memory about a movie, show, or person on the tip of your tongue
• Find the best movie or show to watch next
• Empower you to share your entertainment knowledge and opinions with the world’s largest community of fans

For fans deciding what to watch and where to watch it, we offer local movie showtimes , ticketing , trailers ,  critic and user reviews , personalized recommendations , photo galleries, entertainment news, quotes, trivia, box-office data , editorial feature sections and a universal Watchlist . To learn more about watching Trailers, Clips, Featurettes, and IMDb Originals, please see the IMDb Video FAQs .

IMDb creates new original video content each week and you can find it all at IMDb Originals .

You can find new videos highlighted every day on the IMDb homepage via your desktop computer or IMDb app.

You can read more about IMDb in our  Press Room .

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IMDbPro Features

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is the largest, most comprehensive movie database on the web. It offers an extensive database of movie, TV show, and cast information. The site was officially launched in 1990 and is now owned by Amazon.com.

IMDb is an extremely detailed and rich source of film data that features top movies, news, reviews, movie trailers , showtimes, DVD movie reviews, celebrity profiles, and more. If you’ve ever researched a movie or actor, you’ve probably landed on IMDb. 

The site is truly a mammoth repository of movie information, and while it’s great that most of it is completely free to access, it can seem cluttered and hard to sift through. Below are some tips on how to use IMDb, as well as a look at some of its features, including what you get with IMDbPro.

IMDb is, in a word, extensive. It’s a huge hub of entertainment information. Nearly any search engine will point you there if you’re looking up the plot to a movie or if you’re trying to find out who played in a film you just watched or who’s going to be in an upcoming TV show.

There’s a staggering array of information related to the entertainment industry: scripts, trivia, director/producer information, publicity contacts, plot summaries, movie trailers, etc. In addition to background information, the Internet Movie Database also offers exclusive character resources like biographies and memorable quotes, plus includes the ability to instantly watch TV shows and movies for free.

Users are invited to participate in the site's ever-growing wealth of information by rating movies on a scale. IMDb’s “top” pages—such as the 250 films in the Top Rated Movies list—are based on these user votes of confidence (or disapproval), which steadily rotates a list of movies through the list of favorites depending on votes received.

Most pages associated with a movie or TV show on IMDb offer several features, including a plot synopsis, plot summary, storyline, cast information, review scores, tagged genres, images, videos, nominations, similar titles, box office details, runtime, trivia, frequently asked questions, user reviews, quotes, and more.

You can also build your own private or public watchlists. These can contain the movies and shows you're interested in. They serve as a great way to collect titles you're planning on watching, and you can even sort them by rating, runtime, popularity, and other useful criteria.

IMDb Advanced Search Options

Upcoming Releases and other IMDb Charts like Most Popular Movies and Top Box Office are some of the more popular ways to use IMDb, but there are actually several ways to search through the site.

You might need to pick one method over another if you’re looking for a new movie to watch or if you have only one or two bits of information to start the search, such as an actor’s name or information on the plot.

• IMDb Name Search : Find titles by an actor’s name, birthday or birthplace, star sign, death date or place, gender, filmography, name group (like Oscar-Winning or Best Actress-Winning ), and more.
• IMDb Title Search : Search for movies and shows by their title, runtime, title type ( TV episode, TV short, short film, feature film , etc.), release date, user rating, number of votes, genre, title group ( IMDb “Top 100” or Emmy Award-Winning ), title data ( locations , crazy credits , alternate versions , etc.), companies (like Sony or Paramount), instant watch options, US certificates (PG, NC-17, etc.), countries, keywords, language, filming location, cast/crew, runtime, sound mix, and more.
• IMDb Collaborations Search : This search type lets you find movies and shows where two people of your choosing appear, or you can find people who played in the same film by searching for two titles.
• IMDb Site Index : This one lists various interesting places you can browse on IMDb, such as Best of the year , Bottom 100 , Birthdays , and Amazon Originals .
• Film Genres : Browse IMDb by genre to find horror movies, comedies, animations, fantasy films, thrillers, crime shows, and lots more.

IMDb Free Movies

The Internet Movie Database doesn’t just have information on movies and shows, but also free films you can watch right now. Originally called Freedive, and then IMDb TV, this service is now called Amazon Freevee .

You can pay for some features of IMDb if you want them. However, they’re aimed more toward people looking for contacts in the entertainment business.

Subscribing to IMDbPro lets you:

• Claim your own IMDb page
• Track updates from people/title profiles to always have the latest information
• Find industry contacts and talent representation
• See titles not available on IMDb

There’s a free 30-day trial of IMDbPro before the $12.50 /month price kicks in. That price is for if you pay for one year upfront ($149.99), or you can opt for the slightly more expensive month-to-month subscription for $19.99.

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5 Best IMDb Alternatives for Free Movie and TV Series Databases

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The Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, is the world's most popular website and app to look up information about any film or TV show. But it has a few issues. There have been complaints about its rating system not being transparent. The site is owned by Amazon and aggressively promotes Prime Video content. And its famous discussion boards have now been reduced to just another place with unreliable reviews.

But there are free alternative movie databases that give you similar information. Some even let you choose ratings from different places to sort their databases. And fans of the old discussion boards have created better sites for you to chat about what you're watching.

1. TMDB (Web): Ad-Free, Community-Powered, Best IMDb Alternative

TMDB has been around since 2008 and is entirely written and edited by its users, much like Wikipedia. And you won't find any ads or promotions if you register for a free account.

TMDB covers both films and TV series, with a detailed database for alternative titles, cast, crew, descriptions of each episode, runtime, and where it's currently streaming (works in certain countries). You'll also find user reviews and discussions for each entry, but be careful because you might easily come across spoilers. And finally, you can browse any publicly available media about the title, like trailers, posters, set images, and logos.

Registered users can also create personal watchlists to track what to watch or create public lists for others to see and contribute to. In select countries, you can also filter by streaming services to find what's available for you.

You'll find a lot of non-English and regional content on TMDb that you might not easily come across on IMDb, especially for older releases. It's so comprehensive that popular movie trackers like Trakt.TV and Letterboxd use this database. After all, there's a reason we've previously said The Movie Database is the best IMDb alternative out there.

2. All Movie (Web): Old-School & Simple Movie Database

Launched in 1990, IMDb is almost as old as the world wide web. The next oldest movie database is AllMovie, which started in 1998 and still going strong. But while IMDb sports a modern look, AllMovie retains a sense of old-school simplicity and minimalism that is refreshing to browse. And it's only movies on this site, as you won't find TV series.

The main page shows a marquee banner of currently popular films, and you can then browse new and upcoming releases in a box. Two other sections show what's available to stream or buy digital, and current box office earnings. The rest of the site is about browsing by genre, mood, or theme, or using powerful search features to find what you want from its vast Hollywood and foreign films database.

Each title's page furthers the simplicity that AllMovie is known for. The first tab only gives you a synopsis, and then you can read an original review from the site's writers or user reviews. Finally, you'll find cast and crew information or awards it won. AllMovie isn't as comprehensive as IMDb or TMDB in the cast and crew details. Still, it usually covers the more famous or essential aspects of film-making.

3. TV Maze (Web): Comprehensive and Detailed TV Show Database

While AllMovie is for films, TV Maze is for TV series and shows. This site focuses on what's playing on TV channels. And, of course, streaming services count as "channels."

The main page shows today's TV schedule in the sidebar and popular shows airing that day or upcoming season premieres. There's a detailed episode calendar to keep up with TV schedules, and registered users can also include their favorite streaming services. Plus, you can track your favorite series and get reminders whenever an episode is coming out.

TV Maze includes a comprehensive episode and season database for any TV show. You'll find cast and crew information, descriptions of each episode, guest stars, character biographies and appearances, a media gallery, and news.

The website mainly caters to channels or shows in the U.S. or U.K. While there are listings for other countries and shows at times, don't rely on TV Maze for those; instead, find local sites similar to this.

4. MovieChat (Web): Internet's Largest Discussion Boards for Film and TV

In 2017, IMDb announced it was closing its discussion boards, a beloved part of the website for movie fans. After all, each film had its own forum, with multiple sub-topics for fans to talk about different aspects of the movie. One of these fans was Jim Smith. And that's how MovieChat was born.

Like the original IMDb discussion boards, MovieChat gives a sub-forum for every film and TV show. So, if it's on IMDb, you'll find it on MovieChat. And within that sub-forum, you can create and participate in as many threads as possible. But you do have to abide by the community guidelines. And in a frustrating UI experience, you can only sort the threads by latest post, not by popularity.

Nonetheless, these are small sacrifices for the chance to participate in the internet's largest community of film fans talking about what they watched. So it's doubly great when you find out that Smith backed up posts for IMDb's top 10,000 movies and TV shows before the discussion boards were discontinued.

MovieChat is an excellent example of how the internet serves its users even when corporations can't. It's also worth reading Wired's excellent article about Smith's crusade.

5. Big Cartoon Database (Web): Database of All Cartoons Ever Made

What IMDb does for movies, Big Cartoon Database (BCDB) does for cartoons. The website hosts a meticulous record of all cartoons ever made, along with all the information you'd want to know about it.

Whether it's Flintstones or Bugs Bunny, BCDB has the details about any toon. You'll get information about episodes or standalone cartoons, complete with a synopsis of what it's about, the cast and crew who worked on it, production notes, and media if available. You'll also often find links to download the cartoon through Amazon or iTunes.

BCDB also helps you discover cartoons with sections such as top 25 toons, most popular cartoons, or the monthly "hot 100". Or you can browse by studios such as Disney, Pixar, MGM, Warner Bros, etc. Finally, you can also chat with fellow cartoon lovers on the BCDB forums.

Ignore the Ratings

Whether you use IMDb or one of these alternatives, it's probably best if you ignore the rating system. Movie studios, fans, and other biases have crept into the movie-rating methodology. As a result, these ratings are not necessarily a reliable metric of whether a film is good or bad.

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How IMDb Can Be Older Than the First Web Browser

H ere’s a riddle: the Internet Movie Database, the now-ubiquitous website that tracks pretty much every speck of info about movies and TV, will celebrate its 25th birthday on Saturday. But the 25th anniversary of the proposal that gave birth to the World Wide Web won’t come around till November. That means that the website is older than the web.

The answer is actually relatively straightforward. As IMDb’s founder Col Needham explained in 2010, it was on Oct. 17, 1990 that he “published a series of scripts which allowed you to search a lists [sic] of credits collected by a wonderful USENET group.” Web browsers, which were how many non-experts first encountered the Internet, were still on their way, but the Internet had been around for years at that point. The Usenet system of discussion groups (later described by TIME as “a bulletin-board system that began as a competitor to the Internet but has been largely subsumed by it”) allowed tech-savvy people with similar interests to communicate.

Needham’s interest was movies. As he would later explain to the Los Angeles Times , he had long kept track of the details about every movie he watched, and later began to compile lists of actresses and actors and their work. In 1990 he made his database public so others could search it. The database moved to the web a few years later, and was incorporated in 1996.

The early IMDb wasn’t exactly the super-complete site today’s users are accustomed to, but it was pretty impressive nonetheless: users could search several fields that are still in use today, like character name and production company, or browse curated features like a user-selected list of the top 250 movies and a column (written in Comic Sans) called “The WASHED-UPdate” about stars of the ’70s and ’80s. (You can browse a 1996 version of IMDb.com using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine here .)

By 1998, TIME dubbed the “astonishing” site “the most awesome movie database you’ll ever peruse.”

Read more: 4 Things You Might Not Have Known About the World Wide Web’s Inventor

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IMDb , Web site that provides information about millions of films and television programs as well as their cast and crew. The name is an acronym for Internet Movie Database. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com , IMDb is based in Seattle , but the office of Col Needham, the founder and CEO, remains in Bristol , England, where the Web site was founded.

Needham, an English software engineer and film buff, began what became IMDb with a list of all the films he had seen since 1980. The stated founding date of IMDb is October 17, 1990, when Needham posted his movie-listing software to a USENET film discussion group. The site was cooperatively expanded and became an early migrant to the World Wide Web . IMDb.com was incorporated in January 1996 and was purchased by Amazon.com two years later. Amazon, an online bookseller then in the process of expanding its product line, intended to use IMDb as a platform for sales of videotapes and DVDs . (In the 21st century many films became electronically accessible directly from the IMDb site through Amazon Video.) But even after becoming an Amazon subsidiary, IMDb retained its identity and considerable autonomy . Needham stayed on as chief executive.

The IMDb site grew beyond its original purpose of indexing credits in film and TV productions. An entry for a film may now cover studios and other companies associated with the film, release dates in various countries, censor classifications, box-office grosses, awards won, and other information. The entries for performers, directors, writers, and others involved in film and TV productions are also comprehensive . Some entries include photos, videos, and coming-attraction trailers.

There is no charge to search the IMDb site. Users who want to rate or review movies or contribute data must sign up for an IMDb account, but this step is also free of charge. In 2002 the company started IMDbPro as a fee-based service for industry professionals. IMDbPro has features that allow actors and other workers to post their resumes and contact information, and producers and other executives can provide various details about their productions. In 2008 IMDb made two important acquisitions. One was Box Office Mojo, a Web site founded in 1999 that parses Hollywood box-office grosses in great detail. The other was Withoutabox, founded in 2000 as an electronic interface between film festivals in search of films and filmmakers in search of audiences. Like many other Web sites, IMDb moved into mobile applications during the 21st century.

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Can You Watch 4K Over-the-Air Broadcasts? It's Complicated

Can't find what you want on youtube try this quick trick, spotify, i am begging you to let me take a break from songs, quick links, what is the internet archive, the internet archive hosts some true classic movies, the archive goes way beyond movies, how is the internet archive legal, there's even more movie magic out there.

The internet has more content than one human could experience, yet much is already lost! This is true of movies in particular. Most early films were lost decades ago , but with modern technology, we don't need to lose any more.

The Internet Archive is a digital library founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle . The Internet Archive aims to provide free access to all knowledge by collecting and preserving digital content, including websites, books, software, music, and more.

The Internet Archive began as a way to preserve and make accessible the rapidly growing amount of digital content on the internet. It started by using web crawlers to collect and archive websites, creating a digital version of the " Wayback Machine " that allows users to see how a website looked at a particular point in time. Over time, the Internet Archive has expanded to include various digital media, including books, music, software, and videos.

Related: What Is the Wayback Machine, and Why Is It Important?

Today, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization supported by donations and grants. It continues to collect and preserve digital content and make it available to the public for free.

The Internet Archive has a vast collection of movies, including many classic, independent, and foreign films. Some of the most interesting and notable movies preserved on the Internet Archive include:

• The General (1926): A silent comedy film directed by and starring Buster Keaton.
• Metropolis (1927): A German expressionist science fiction film directed by Fritz Lang.
• Nosferatu (1922): A German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): A German Expressionist horror film directed by Robert Wiene.
• The Red Balloon (1956): A French fantasy film directed by Albert Lamorisse.
• Battleship Potemkin (1925): A silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein.
• The Night of the Living Dead (1968): A horror film directed by George A. Romero.
• The Mummy (1932): A horror film directed by Karl Freund.

These are just a few examples of the many fascinating and important movies preserved on the Internet Archive. If you are a movie buff, you can explore the Internet Archive's collection to discover more hidden gems and classic films. Not to mention lost episodes of TV shows, or TV pilots that never made it to screen!

As mentioned above, in addition to movies, the Internet Archive has a vast collection of other types of digital content. Some of the other types of content available on the Internet Archive include:

• Books: The Internet Archive has a collection of over 36 million books.
• Music: The Internet Archive has a collection of over two million recordings of music, including recordings of live concerts, radio broadcasts, and other audio content.
• Software: The Internet Archive has a collection of over 950,000 software programs and games, including many classic and historical examples.
• Television: The Internet Archive has a collection of over three million television programs, including episodes of classic TV shows, news programs, and more.
• Websites: The Internet Archive has a collection of over 780 billion web pages, including many historical versions of websites.
• Audio recordings: The Internet Archive has a collection of over 15 million audio recordings, including lectures, interviews, and other audio content.
• Images: The Internet Archive has a collection of over 4.5 million images, including photographs, illustrations, and other visual media.

The Internet Archive is essentially an online public library operating within the bounds of copyright law and works with rights holders to ensure that the content it collects and preserves is made available legally. In many cases, the content on the Internet Archive is in the public domain or is licensed under Creative Commons or other open licenses that allow for free distribution and use.

Related: Is Downloading Retro Video Game ROMs Ever Legal?

Of course, intellectual property laws vary from one country to another. Something that's in the public domain in one nation may not be in yours. However, everything on the archive is legal within the legal jurisdiction from which it operates.

That doesn't mean the site isn't involved with litigation from time to time. For example, there are copyright holders who have made legal challenges to the Internet Archive's "lending library" practices with regard to ebooks. In general, this isn't something that you need to worry about as a site visitor.

Related: How to Download Free eBooks with Amazon Prime

The Internet Archive is certainly one of the largest repositories of media on the internet and a crucial project to preserve movies, TV shows, and many other media that would otherwise disappear. It's a worthy cause, but if you love exploring the history of movies, especially more recent ones, there are many other hidden gem sites on the web.

The Internet Archive isn't the only library service on the web offering movies. If you have a library card from a participating library, you can stream movies without ads for free on services such as Hoopla and Kanopy .

Genre film fans, in particular, can access plenty of free content in popular genres such as action films , horror films , or something a little more festive . So if you're scrolling through Netflix and can't choose anything  maybe consider diving into the archives.

Genre Analysis of Movie Reviews in Malaysian Online Newspapers: Uncovering Structural Patterns

• Khairul Firhan Yusob Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia
• Khairunisa Nikman Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia
• Nurul Jannah Ahmad Ghulamuddin Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia
• Intan Fitri Aisyah Hamzah Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia

Movie reviews are an important indicator of the quality of a movie and help cinemagoers in their decision-making process. With the advent of technology, the consumption of movie reviews has shifted primarily to online platforms, including newspaper websites, blogs and established movie domain sites such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Consequently, it provides more room for the audience to express their opinions about the movies. Despite this shift, there still needs to be more research on the structural nuances of online film reviews in newspapers, particularly in the Malaysian context. To address this gap, this study examines movie reviews published by local newspapers from a genre-based perspective, focusing on their underlying structures. Ten movie reviews were collected from a local newspaper's website and analysed to identify recurring patterns and moves within the genre. The analysis shows that the genre comprised eight steps, ranging from providing information about the movies to making recommendations to readers. The identified moves are M1: Title of the Movie Review, M2: Providing information about the movie, M3: Grabbing readers' attention, M4: Describing the movie, M5: Giving criticism, M6: Offering recommendations to the readers, M7: Concluding the review and M8: Relating to other movies. Notably, Move 5, which involves criticism of the movies, was the most elaborated step with various steps and sub-steps. Further, the analysis also shows a few structural patterns of the genre. This study provides valuable insights for readers who want to understand the elements that shape movie reviews in local newspapers.

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• Cast & crew

Speak No Evil

A family is invited to spend a weekend in an idyllic country house, unaware that their dream vacation will soon become a psychological nightmare. A family is invited to spend a weekend in an idyllic country house, unaware that their dream vacation will soon become a psychological nightmare. A family is invited to spend a weekend in an idyllic country house, unaware that their dream vacation will soon become a psychological nightmare.

• James Watkins
• Christian Tafdrup
• Mads Tafdrup
• James McAvoy
• Mackenzie Davis
• Scoot McNairy
• 3 Critic reviews

• Louise Dalton

• Agnes Dalton

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• Trivia A remake of the 2022 Danish film of the same name.

[Agnes and Ant perform a cowboy dance set to "Cotton-Eyed Joe".]

Paddy : [interrupting] Ant, what is wrong with you? Just feel the rhythm in your feet like...

[demonstrating]

Paddy : one, two, three, four. This is a one.

[the children resume their dance.]

Paddy : [furious] NO!

[he chucks a piece of food at Ant.]

Louise Dalton : What is wrong with you?

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