As recently as 2023 I mentioned that I still didn’t see the point of Letterboxd, but less than four years later I log on nearly every day. What has changed is, in a word, volume. Not long after that post went live, I noted in my “Reflections on Movie Year 2022” that I had seen approximately 75 new films; this year I’m already at 120 with months to go before I make my top ten list. I’ve been meaning to go into a bit more detail about how exactly I use the site to keep track of everything for a while now, and yesterday Jordan Ruimy handed me a perfect opportunity by writing about some disparaging comments director James Gray recently made about the platform which run exactly counter to what I wanted to say!
As Ruimy notes, Gray’s first complaint is that Letterboxd promotes “instant reaction,” which is a problem because “you need some time to think about what you’ve just seen.” While he may be right, capturing my initial reactions to what I’m seeing so that I can come back to them later and develop the promising ones further is something I actively try to do on the site. Another one of Gray’s targets, Letterboxd’s star ratings, plays an important role in this process. Whereas he sees them as representing “an overt disrespect for cinema,” I find them extremely useful as a way of rough-sorting films to help me figure out which ones I want to spend time with. As I explain in the “bio” section of my profile, each possible rating has a specific meaning for me. If I give something five stars, for instance, indicating that it’s “one of the best movies I’ve ever seen,” I’m basically promising to write about it. Four-star ratings are a guarantee that I’ll talk about the film in my next year-end Top Ten (Percent) list, and ratings between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 stars mean there’s something there worth talking about. Finally, while I generally reserve lower ratings for things I don’t have a lot to say about, they too are a handy way of identifying outliers.
Later in the conversation Ruimy is quoting from, IndieWire‘s Ryan Lattanzio says that he stopped using star ratings because to be accurate they’d have to change all the time. Gray responds by turning his fire on Rotten Tomatoes, citing 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of a movie that “would probably be assessed as rotten” by way of proving his point that stars and other rating systems are “insane.” Ruimy agrees, noting that “Kubrick’s film opened to a famously split critical response in 1968, with some major critics dismissing it outright.” He goes on to comment that you actually won’t see evidence of this on Rotten Tomatoes, and that when he put together a list of great movies with bad scores a few years ago, “the hardest part was finding classics that were still under 60%” because “reconsideration over the years had pushed most of them into fresh territory.” Once again, I see in all of this a feature, not a bug! Like Lattanzio, I often find that my feelings about films change upon revisiting them, and star ratings accompanied by reviews give me a way to quantify and study this process. To the point about 2001, whereas review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes flatten history, Letterboxd gives us a way to observe such changes on a cultural level as they happen, making it a boon to critics and scholars.
The key to everything is thoughtfulness and transparency. As Gray says, “the most important thing you can do when you critique something is to do it with some measure of humility.” Letterboxd invites users to “review” films, but it also uses the nomenclature “diary,” which is actually how I prefer to think about what I’m doing there: I’m jotting down ideas with the intention of returning to them later and doing so in a public space to invite other people into the conversation. That’s also why I define what each of my ratings means. If I’m going to reduce a film to a number, even provisionally, readers deserve to know what it stands for. Seen this way, a star rating isn’t a verdict at all: it’s metadata.
