I thought you hated films.

[Podey]

Thread for film chat, anyone? 

I’m in the “Digger was brilliant” side of the divide, also really enjoyed ‘Resident Evil’ and ‘Teenage Sex and Death in Camo Miasma’ might be my pick of 2026 so far. Off to see ‘Whalefall’ in 4DX today.

Topic

[Moonlight]

I have a friend who gives absolutely everything 5 stars.

I reserve 5 stars for personal favorites.

[Moonlight]

Today’s viewing:

I already discussed Jacob’s Ladder (1990) but I rewatched it today with a bunch of friends who hadn’t seen it.

Later, with someone else, I rewatched one of my all-time favorites: Return of the Living Dead (1985), which I would describe as a farce. Much like a classic sitcom episode, it follows a series of bad decisions cascading out of control.

[Podey]

Love Return of The Living Dead! 

About to watch The Social Reckoning. 

[Nick R]

@Warbodog:

Some of my favourite films seen in recent years, not from recent years, and why I’m not on Letterboxd:

If you did join Letterboxd, you could post reviews as short as that if you wanted to! Your comments in that post are more insightful than a lot of the one-liner meme jokes that end up at the top of the Popular Reviews section.

As for the talk about 5 star ratings:

I am generous with giving out 3, 3.5, and 4 star scores, with very few of 2.5 stars or less. That’s mostly because I don’t seek out things I doubt I’ll like in the first place, so my ratings curve is never going to be perfectly distributed over the full rating scale. I often feel like I should try to fix that by forcing myself to give out more low scores, so that I can make use of more of the full range, and have more gradations to measure how much I like something. But I’m always hesitant to give out low scores, because being able to point out just a few of things that I liked about a movie is often enough to make me bump up my rating from 2 to 2.5, or from 2.5 to 3. (Especially when I see a review or hear an audio commentary that explains what other people see in them.) So it takes something really bad for me to give out scores of ★ or ★½ – and I’ve never sat all the way through anything terrible enough to get half a star!

But at the top end of the scale, I am quite strict about giving things ★★★★½ stars, and even more rigorous about giving things full marks. I think the only two things of the 2020s that I’ve given five stars on Letterboxd are Wolfwalkers and The Beatles: Get Back.

[Nick R]

Also, here’s a question for the room:
Do you watch through the credits of a movie, or are you an adult who still doesn’t eat the pizza crusts?

I always sit through all the credits at the cinema, even if it’s not a film that has any chance of having a post-credit scene, or doesn’t have other specific things I’m curious about (like the music credits towards the end). I even sat through all the credits of The Odyssey, even though my local cinema projected that darker than it should have been so that the dark blue credits text was almost unreadably dim. Which was weird, because I didn’t struggle too much to make out the dark scenes in the movie itself.

Bonus points whenever a film has a full length title sequence and theme music.

I think the James Bond films – as rare as they are nowadays – are some of the few major films that still stubbornly insist on putting a proper opening credits sequence at (or at least near) the start.

[Dave]

I am generous with giving out 3, 3.5, and 4 star scores, with very few of 2.5 stars or less.

If they allow .5 star ratings then why not just make it a mark out of 10?

[Nick R]

If they allow .5 star ratings then why not just make it a mark out of 10?

You mean do the same as – ugh! – IMDb?

[Author]

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