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Categories, Views, Sort Modes allows you to find and browse the "best" films by 9 Categories :
For each of these categories 3 levels of View are available :
Each screen (except Oscar and Freeview categories) can be sorted in 8 ways :

Major limitations of Netflix and Amazon Prime (in contrast to Spotify)

Netflix and Amazon Prime don't provide an API (application programming interface) and their websites are designed to be difficuly to "scrape" to reliably extract data (which is why I'm not updating their data on this site). "Fair enough" you might think? I'd say it harbours the end for humanity! You are no longer a free thinking individual allowed to make informed personal choices, but are spoon fed whatever the Netflix or Amazon AI algorithms decide are probably the best option for "people like you" and encouraged to accept what's offered before it times out. Who controls the algorithms and how are they generated and updated? At what point, if any, do individuals make a well informed personally considered choice?

This lack of an API means even if you find a good Netflix / Amazon Prime film on this website you can't click on it to watch it (a big contrast to the marvellous folk at Spotify who provide an excellent free API making it easy for software developers to provide a front end to the Spotify platform).

How this website rates Films

For each film we try to find ratings from 3 sources : and then average these to create a percentage rating.

Example film entry (in List View) :

89% (3)  1947  It's a Wonderful Life   [Frank Capra]  Drama, Family, Fantasy

Format :

Rating (Number of ratings) Year Title [Director] GenreList

A rating from 3 sources is considered more reliable than the same rating from 2 or 1 sources, hence the default film sort order is "NumReviews, Rating Down". This helps to reliably find the "best" films, but excellent films with 2 or 1 ratings may be overlooked. To avoid this set the sort order to "Rating down" - which ignores the number of ratings.

How To Find The "Best" Recent Films

Use sort order "Year, Rating down".

Where have all the Towns and Cities gone?

I used to aim to update the films each week or so for 608 towns and cities in the UK, but given that I'm the only user (probably) this is now cut back to 4 (bristol ambleside blackburn london).

Miscellaneous Website Features

Best Actors and Best Directors Tables : The website works out the best actors and best directors for each decade (since 1915) and of all time. For an insight into the best actors and directors over time try the flexible "Decade Summary" table (and click on any Actor / Director to view their web pages within the site). Guess who is the only actor to have become "Actor of the Decade" twice? (so long as we include animations - which seem to often get very high ratings).