Movies Need to be Reviewed by Genre on Letterboxd

 When Letterboxd launched in 2011, it was meant to be a digital diary for cinephiles. A place to log movies, jot down thoughts, and quietly judge yourself for giving Titanic five stars again. It was personal first, social second. Fast forward to now, and while the cinephiles are still here, they’re sharing the app with casual moviegoers, irony-posters, and users whose “Top Four” are carefully curated to spark chaos in group chats. 

To be clear, this isn’t a bad thing. Letterboxd’s recent explosion in popularity has made the app livelier, funnier, and occasionally unhinged in the best way. But with that growth has come a noticeable shift in how people rate movies. Scores feel less like honest reactions and more like social currency, with users nudging their ratings closer to a film’s average so they don’t look wrong for liking or disliking something too much. That pressure feeds into one of Letterboxd’s biggest identity crises: comparing movies that were never supposed to be in the same conversation. 

Suddenly, Marty Supreme is being weighed against People We Meet on Vacation, and Little Women is somehow competing with Inception. All four films succeed at exactly what they’re trying to be, yet they’re judged on a single, shared scale as if they’re chasing the same emotional response. But movies don’t work like that. No one wakes up craving the same genre every day. Sometimes you need a rom-com to emotionally recover from a breakup. Other days, you want an action movie that pairs well with the workout you just completed. 

Genre sets expectations, mood, and even how forgiving we are as viewers, yet Letterboxd treats every film like it’s auditioning for the same cultural approval. If Letterboxd truly wants to celebrate cinema in all its messy, contradictory glory, it might be time to rethink how films are reviewed and logged. Organizing ratings by genre would allow movies to be appreciated on their own terms and remind users that loving a goofy rom-com just as much as a prestige drama isn’t a contradiction. It’s proof that movies are still doing what they’ve always done best: meeting audiences exactly where they are.