Cinesift: find a film to watch

February 2, 2016 2:12 AM

Cinesift: A movie database site that combines Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Letterboxd and Metacritic scores, with Netflix, Amazon Prime and DVD availability, to quickly help users find what to watch.
posted by paleyellowwithorange (26 comments total)

Based on the classic Mom philosophy: If all of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?
posted by fairmettle at 2:36 AM on February 2, 2016

Does the cliff have good ratings?
posted by bigendian at 3:04 AM on February 2, 2016 [15 favorites]

It has regions for Netflix. Yay!
posted by Harald74 at 3:14 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

But not for Prime, which is a bit annoying. Picked up a couple of things though, may well get round to watching Cabinet of Dr Caligari at the weekend. It looks like I will have to start watching documentaries.
posted by biffa at 3:37 AM on February 2, 2016

I like the interface. This is probably a very good tool for finding well-rated films that are streaming.

It doesn't have an entry for quite a few films, though-- Cisco Pike, Freebie and the Bean, Brainstorm, Magnificent Butcher, Brimstone & Treacle, The Wilby Conspiracy, Nuts in May, From Beyond the Grave, The Lathe of Heaven, Mr. Vampire, The Draughtman's Contract, Payday, Odds Against Tomorrow, 'Night Mother, Born to Kill... all have DVDs on Amazon, all not found on this site. I wonder how they built their database and/or what defines disc availability.
posted by heatvision at 4:23 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is great, I've made a list of "recent horror I've missed" already.

I love the "exclude these genres" part - it's really needed.
posted by CjEggett at 4:25 AM on February 2, 2016

Nicely done. Hope that they expand their list a bit. Hulu+ would be handy.
posted by octothorpe at 5:09 AM on February 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is exactly what I have been needing. Thank you!
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:20 AM on February 2, 2016

This looks interesting and worth a deeper exploration this evening.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:44 AM on February 2, 2016

Based on the classic Mom philosophy: If all of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?

What does this mean? Are you comparing peer pressure to using critic reviews to decide whether you'd like a movie? There's not a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram.

I think this a great resource. A lot more usable than canistream.it. It'd be nice if they could add Hulu, but what I really want is the same thing for TV shows.
posted by mokin at 5:58 AM on February 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

I was just thinking that I wish letterboxd would let me know if something on my watchlist was available for streaming.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there is an easy way to apply this to my letterboxd watchlist without manually copying it over.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 6:00 AM on February 2, 2016

Letterboxd has the option is you are a paid member.

I wish this had HBO and Hulu on it. Since it doesn't, I'll probably stick to canistream.it.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:03 AM on February 2, 2016

Letterboxd has the option is you are a paid member.

Yeah, but it doesn't really work. The Netflix listings are all out of date and it doesn't distinguish between Amazon and Amazon Prime so it's not really all that useful. I'm not sure what's up with Letterboxd, there's stuff like that that's been broken forever and they hadn't really added any new features in years.
posted by octothorpe at 6:20 AM on February 2, 2016

Just Watch is a pretty cool new service that has basically all the streaming systems.
posted by octothorpe at 6:22 AM on February 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

The ability to create a random timeframe (e.g., 1955 - 1988) is pretty neat.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:26 AM on February 2, 2016

Yeah, I like being able to filter out anything after about 1982 so I can watch movies without hyperactive editing and shakeycam.
posted by octothorpe at 6:31 AM on February 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

Kind of a bummer that the couple of movies it suggested that I have checked out so far that it said were on Amazon Prime were not in fact Prime. But I like the idea of the website and all the filtering options.
posted by jenjenc at 6:55 AM on February 2, 2016

I'm not sure what's up with Letterboxd, there's stuff like that that's been broken forever and they hadn't really added any new features in years.

Just like many other projects of the same kind, I'm guessing funds are all spent on server bills, and the coders treat this as a weekend project.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:16 AM on February 2, 2016

1. How does this compare to JustWatch and the like?
2. For just discovering good movies to watch (as opposed to finding where to stream a particular movie), I've had really good luck with Criticker.
3. In general, the market for streaming is a weird one. You can find some esoteric movies online, but I recently found it impossible to find an online streaming source for Fritz the Cat, a fairly important and famous work from 1972.
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:14 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I checked a few movies and it was inaccurate about what was on amazon prime. Still, useful for assembling a watchlist for when things do hit prime.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:42 AM on February 2, 2016

Looks nice, and I've signed up and am playing around with it, but I *really* wish you could just search for a particular actor/actress or director. Maybe that feature will come.
posted by Ufez Jones at 9:57 AM on February 2, 2016

Sometimes, I feel like a giant doofus for spending so much time and mental energy figuring out how to watch TV, but then I go on the internet to research what I'm trying to do and remember that I'm not alone. The way people watch media changed dramatically just in a few years, and there are lots of people scrambling around trying to figure out ways to streamline and improve their workflows and scheduling and stuff like watching movies is a job.

It is frustrating that, with so much information available out there on the internet, it's all scattered and obfuscated. Currently, I have my queues on the streaming services I subscribe to, and I have a bigassed queue on gowatchit.com tracking availability of movies I want to see, and a Letterboxd account where I keep track of what I have watched for whatever ridiculous reason I think that's important, and honestly, I'm getting a little burned out on setting up accounts and reentering all this information on different sites that are probably tracking and profiling me, only to have them not work or change, or worse, sometimes just go under and take my lists with them.

My crazy dream is to find a single service where I can consolidate, filter, and sort my queues. So I put in a movie once, in one location, it grabs sortable details from a film database and from review sites, and then searches streaming sources so I can see what is and is not available from what source, from a computer or an app on my TV, and it integrates with those services so I can play it directly, then maybe keep a record of my watching activity.

All that information is out there on the internet already, in content databases and review sites, and on the streaming services. I'm pretty sure the weak link is the streaming services' APIs because they don't want third parties to be able to easily query their databases. I've tried tons of different sites, and none of them are always right about what's available where.

Preview PS for Ufez Jones: The options are there, under Advanced Options > Search Fields. It's not working for me, though.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:10 AM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah it's crazy how fractured stuff is. But it does not help that all the first order search capability (i.e. what the service providers offer) is such garbage
posted by RustyBrooks at 10:14 AM on February 2, 2016

I like fan tv for this - also iOS and android. They have a ton of sources, hulu, networks, hbo, netflix, amazon prime... included.

(My only quibble is that I don't know how often they refresh their availability lists. For example, season 1 of Better Call Saul is on Netflix as of yesterday, and they don't show it there yet.)
posted by thatone at 10:15 AM on February 2, 2016

Preview PS for Ufez Jones: The options are there, under Advanced Options > Search Fields. It's not working for me, though.

Ah, thank you! That was incredibly difficult and unintuitive to find but I got it, damn it.
posted by Ufez Jones at 11:59 AM on February 2, 2016

All this does for me is confirm that every movie I want to see is somehow unavailable. We gave up on Netflix and Amazon Prime and TW On Demand and everybody else because every damn search ended in frustration. We'd start off looking for the obscure stuff, eventually move on to older movies everybody has heard of, then to newer movies everybody's heard of... nothing, nothing, nothing. We used to have much better luck at Hollywood Video, which is kind of ridiculous because they were just some chain video store and the web has a theoretically infinite inventory. The web guys really want me to just buy Guardians of the Galaxy and a few seasons of Monk, and like it.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:21 PM on February 2, 2016