I never thought I would use Letterboxd. The app’s premise of logging reviews of every film you watch felt like counting steps, and I generally prefer to exercise my pretension the old fashioned way – such as getting a BFA or frequenting art house cinema screenings where I am usually the only person under 50 in the theater.

But after I wrote about my feelgood movie for the Guardian – that would be Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’s perfect 1941 satire – I was swayed by two newsroom colleagues. “Hey Alaina, we heard you like movies,” one of them said. “What’s your Letterboxd?” I wanted to be part of the club, and signed up later that night. Now, I write thoughts on every movie I see, usually before I’ve even left the theater or closed out the streamer.

Though the movie-cataloging app has existed since 2011, it grew in popularity during Covid lockdown, when people stuck at home had little else to do than peacock their film taste. Most Letterboxd users skew young, between the ages of 18 and 34, and tend to spend more money on movies than the typical American. In 2024 the app hit 17 million users, around the same time that the rapid-fire, red carpet interview series Letterboxd Four Favorites started going viral. This modest popularity is set against a film industry in crisis, with productions down and unemployment up. Last week’s announcement of Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros – or will it be a hostile takeover by Paramount Skydance? – felt especially depressing to those who cherish the act of moviegoing, as many fear the streamer’s triumph will be the death knell for cinemas.

On Wednesday, Letterboxd launched an in-app video rental “store” – which, pointedly, it is not calling a streaming service. “Think of it as curated shelves instead of just scrolling lists endlessly without being able to make up your mind on what to watch,” a press release read. The films will include festival circuit darlings that have yet to acquire mainstream distribution (such as It Ends, Alexander Ullom’s horror debut about four friends stuck on an increasingly creepy night drive, which TikTok is particularly excited about), reissues and rediscoveries of forgotten classics, and limited-time drops.

That makes sense, given Letterboxd’s reputation as a haven for the type of A24-pilled film viewer who might wait in line for hours for Marty Supreme swag, or carry a Metrograph-branded tote. We have made fun of archetypal film bro since at least Annie Hall, when Woody Allen’s character cannot stand the man behind him at the movies who over-intellectualizes the latest Fellini film while speaking over his date. Many of Letterboxd’s users come from film Twitter, a masculine-leaning space where outrage, irreverence and purposefully bad takes run rampant. (See: the flurry of discourse about the use of a Nick Cave song in Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s Netflix drama about the life of a Pacific north-west railway worker.)

Still, many of the most-followed people on the app are not your average film bro: the actor Ayo Edebiri is known for her now-deleted account where she called Yoda from Star Wars “ugly” and called a Fast and Furious installment “really and truly post-God”. The pop star Charli xcx has logged more than 1,000 films, with Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) and Phantom Thread (2017) among her top four. Some Letterboxd reviews go viral. Zoë Rose Bryant, a film Twitter stalwart and critic recently posted a very personal take on Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, relating the family drama to her parents’ divorce.

The author’s ‘crash out cinema’ list on Letterboxd. Photograph: Alaina Demopoulos

Letterboxd likes to tout itself as a means of film discovery; users make “watchlists”, some of which are hyperspecific. (One of my friend has cultivated a list of 30 movies about “Fucked-Up British People”, while I made “crash out cinema”, a collection of films to watch when you’re in the throes of a maybe-unrequited crush.) You can browse a feed of your friends’ activity, see what’s popular this week, and search any movie to see every single Letterboxd review on it ever written by anyone.

In an email a representative for Letterboxd wrote: “Letterboxd is less a social media platform, more a community.” It doesn’t have an infinite scroll, or rely on algorithms to inspire a user’s next movie night.

Gigi Leal is a 33-year-old content creator and film horror buff who loves Letterboxd. “It’s like a movie diary,” she said. “It reminds me of the old days of social media, when you just shared your opinions with friends.” Most people agree that Letterboxd’s strength as a social networking site lies in what it *doesn’t *have: there’s no way to message people or post pictures.

“In a way, it’s in its early stage of what it wants to be,” said Chris Hite, a professor of film at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California. “If Letterboxd opens up the types of interactions people can have, then the fear is it goes the way of the toxic environment of Twitter or Facebook that we’ve all witnessed.”

Ezgi Eren writes 11am Saturday, a Substack where she interviews film people about going to the movies; she took the title from her favorite time to catch a screening. “I think there is a danger in Letterboxd becoming a full-on social media platform,” said Eren, who is 35 and lives in Los Angeles. “Maybe people would be incentivized to take pictures in the middle of a movie, or crack jokes at a screening. There’s a joke that Letterboxd should launch a dating app, but I think they should never do that.”

Spencer Turney runs Rewind Room, a pop-up that operates monthly screenings out of the back of a Chicago coffee and plant shop. He scours Letterboxd like a record store cratedigger, looking for films to add to the series. One of those was Chameleon Street, Wendell B Harris Jr’s 1989 Sundance darling about a conman who impersonates doctors, reporters and sports stars.

“That’s Letterboxd’s sweet spot: finding those films that you’re surprised haven’t been given the light of day,” said Turney, 34. “It’s cool to have this shared reference point and language for discussing movies, but you don’t drown away in the brain rot of watching someone throwing Oreo cookies into a lasagne, or whatever else you’d see on TikTok.”

Leal, the horror-movie obsessive, said that Letterboxd has become her “first form of information” when she is researching film, a sort of Rotten Tomatoes that prioritizes friends’ takes over, say, that of New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis. “A lot of times, I’ll just go there to see how other people have perceived it,” she said. “It’s not limiting for me, because I love to watch movies people say are bad and judge for myself. But my boyfriend will see an average review of 2.1 and be like, ‘No, that’s a bad movie’ and not watch it.”

Letterboxd lives in a fractured film ecosystem; few people rely on establishment critics to make a decision about what they want to watch these days. Instead, fans digest culture through YouTube plot breakdowns or TikTok reaction videos, along with their Letterboxd network’s viewing history.

Ali El-Sadany, editor-in-chief of film review site FilmSlop, is an enthusiastic Letterboxd user – even if he is not the biggest fan of its basic premise of distilling a film down to a five-star rating. “I hate that we exist in a world where everything has to be quantified, and I think that we should just watch movies for what they are and tell us how they made you feel as a human being,” he said. Still, he believes that Letterboxd “is an app that brings so many voices together, and has been platforming the better ones most of the time”.

Leal said that she sometimes gets distracted during a movie, thinking about how she will rate it on Letterboxd. This happened during a screening of Marty Supreme, the new Timothée Chalamet ping-pong drama directed by film Twitter favorite Josh Safdie. “Every 15 minutes, I kept thinking ‘don’t forget this line, you want to put it in your review.’”

I know the feeling. A few weeks ago, while sick in bed, I rewatched Singin’ in the Rain, which I first saw when I was 10 years old and have screened countless times since. In the middle of Donald O’Connor’s mind-bogglingly athletic performance of Make ‘Em Laugh, where the former vaudevillian completes multiple backflips and pratfalls, I lazily opened Letterboxd to see what the audience had to say. It took about five minutes of scrolling through reviews to realize I had missed the best part of the movie – one of the best parts of any movie, ever. Sending my cosmic apologies to the long-deceased, but always legendary O’Connor, I closed Letterboxd and went back to watching.