Letterboxd: Movie Criticism or Snobbery?

Over the last few years, the app Letterboxd – where you can rate and review movies – has surged in popularity. This has brought two things with it; more cinephiles, and more judgement. The app allows users to create a profile that displays their top 4 favourite movies – a hardship in itself, because how can you choose? Favourite movies change like the weather, depending on mood and whether you’re assessing it on personal enjoyment and associated memories over objective quality. ‘Letterboxd top 4’ has become a well-used phrase in recent popular culture, but provokes more judgement than genuine interest. Certain movies have become deemed as ‘basic’ due to their popularity – certifiably fantastic ones like La La Land, Dead Poet’s Society and Interstella. Their popularity is synonymous with their quality, so can they really be basic? Similarly, top fours containing more unknown, obscure, perhaps old or foreign films, are labelled as performative. Seems like there’s no winning! 

The app has also become quite integral to how films are perceived. Each one is given an average rating out of 5 starts, calculated off of the users reviews. This can cause a pressure to align your review with the general masses of Letterboxd. Conversely, it is a great way of seeing a general reaction to a film, from people perhaps more movie-orientated than the average person, but not a critic. Critic and audience reviews often differ – for example the new Micheal Jackson biopic was received horribly by critics, while it got a 3.6 average Letterboxd rating. They can agree occasionally though – for perspective, some of the highest rated films on the app are undeniable; 4.6 for The Shawshank Redemption, 4.5 for The Return of the King. It is also interesting to note that users of the app are generally of the younger generation, and how this affects the average review.

Letterboxd is an app meant more for entertainment than critical purposes. The highest-liked reviews are witty comments rather than analyses. This suggests that for many the top 4 on profiles are more fun, re-watchable movies than genuine masterpieces. It’s fun to keep a log of the movies you’ve watched and how much you liked them, even if you get called basic by strangers on the internet. 

Written by, Rosie James