How do you decide which movie to watch next? Do you frequent sites like IMDB regularly to find out, use trailers to form an opinion, get advice from friends and contacts on social networking sites, follow the buzz on Twitter, or try recommendation services instead?
You probably know best what you like and what you don’t like which means that it would make sense to base discovery and recommendations on those factors.
That’s exactly what Movienr brings to the table. The discover feature of the service helps you find movies of interest. It does so in several ways.
When you visit the main discovery page, you can set filters based on genre, theme, place, period, new movies and origin, as well as rating and year range.
- Genre: pick one out of 14 different genres such as action, romantic, sci-fi or thriller.
- Theme: a selection of 28 different themes, from alien and fugitive to racing and war.
- Place: select a place you want the movie to take place in, for instance in a room, desert or underground.
- Period: 14 different time periods are available for selection, from the middle ages to cold war and future.
- New Movies: will display the most recent movies.
- Origin: Select a continent and country.
The range selectors on the other hand allow you to select a year range between 1914 and 2014, for instance the period from 1970 to 1979, and a rating range between 5.0 and 10.0.
While you can combine multiple filters of the same genre, it is not possible to combine different types of filters. So, an action movie with aliens that plays in the middle ages cannot be selected.
What you can do however is combine multiple genres or themes among other things. Want an historical thriller, a horror musical or a romantic sci-fi movie? That’s possible.
All matching movies are displayed right away by the service. Each movie is listed with its name and cover, playing time, actors, rating and a link to a trailer on YouTube. Trailers are loaded in an overlay on the same page.
Results are sorted by rating by default. You can switch to an alphabetical rating or one based on age instead.
Another interesting feature of the site is the movie lists that it makes available. Those are preset filters created by the service itself. It lists prehistoric movies, dystopian movies or historical documentaries among many other lists that you can access with a single click.
Verdict
The filtering system is excellent, especially the option to mix several genres, the theme, place and period filters the site makes available.
Especially the theme, place and period filters need to be mentioned here as they allow you to pick a single topic of interest. This works a lot better than searching for movies on IMDB or a search engine as the accuracy is much greater.
I would have liked to see an option to combine genres with other filter types to customize the recommended list of movies even further.
The site offers a database of nearly 15,000 movies currently. It would be great if more movies — foreign ones for instance and a language selector — are added to the service. As would be to add TV shows to it as well.
For now though, it works really well for what it offers. (via BlogsDNA)