This page says exactly how a list is built, from which data, under which thresholds, and what we refuse to do. It is written to be checked: every figure quoted matches a rule in the code, and if a rule changes, this page changes with it.
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Films, posters, trailers, summaries and audience ratings come from TMDB, a community film database. We use its programming interface without being endorsed or certified by TMDB.
Per-platform availability — which service carries which film, in which country, by subscription, rental or purchase — comes from JustWatch, through TMDB. Podcast data comes from Podcast Index.
We produce no ratings ourselves and have no editorial staff awarding stars. What you read is the TMDB audience rating, unaltered.
Every list is a query to TMDB, different for every page. No two pages on this site can therefore hold the same selection by accident: their two queries would have to be identical.
Two thresholds always apply: a minimum rating and a minimum number of votes. The second matters as much as the first. Without it, a film rated 9 out of 10 by eleven people would outrank a classic seen by a hundred thousand. For a genre page the floor is three hundred votes, dropping to a hundred and fifty when the page is also limited to one decade. Genres that produce little — documentary, western, musical, war film — drop to a hundred and twenty and sixty, or their pages would be empty.
Mood pages have their own, higher thresholds, because they cross several genres and can afford to be stricter. "Films that make you think" requires 7.4 out of 10, the highest floor on the site. Two moods, family and friends, are sorted by popularity rather than rating: for those two evenings, a film everyone already knows does more than a better-rated film nobody has seen.
A film with no poster, no title in the language of the page, or a summary shorter than forty characters, does not enter a list. The global TMDB catalogue holds many ghost entries, and this filter is what keeps them out.
Arabic is the exception: TMDB translates almost no summaries into it, and requiring a synopsis there excluded nine films out of ten. Arabic pages therefore keep the film for what TMDB does render well in that language — poster, title, year, rating — and go without summaries that do not exist.
A page that cannot gather at least twelve films declares itself non-indexable and leaves the sitemap. We would rather have one page fewer than one page that wastes your time.
No two countries have the same streaming catalogue. A "best films on Netflix" list written for the United States is wrong in the UK, and one written six months ago is half wrong today.
Each market on this site therefore queries TMDB with its own availability country, not the country of its language. That is why Brazil and Portugal have separate lists despite sharing a language, and why Mexico and Spain do too.
Lists are recomputed daily. Ratings move slowly; catalogues move fast. It is almost always availability that pushes a title in or out, and that is why every page carries its date.
No place in a list is for sale. No platform, distributor or studio can enter other than by being well rated by the public. We hold no commercial partnership that influences a ranking.
We do not reorder a list according to what it would earn us. We do not add films because they are recent, promoted, or expensive to make.
The questionnaire asks for no account, no email address and no subscription.
Audience ratings do not compare across genres. Horror is structurally underrated because it is watched by people who did not choose it; animation is structurally overrated for the opposite reason. A horror film at 6.8 is often better than a drama at 7.4, and no automatic ranking can say so.
A film under two years old is almost always overrated against what it will be worth in five. The vote floor corrects part of that effect, never all of it.
We depend on a single source for most of this. If TMDB stops, our lists stop with it. That is the weakness we understand best and the one we have not yet fixed.
Film data and posters: TMDB. This app uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.