Why the Future of Movies Lives on Letterboxd
February 06, 2026 at 05:00PMI’m generally pretty averse to “no, but this social platform is actually constructive and nontoxic!” discourse, but movie-watching tracker and film-crit hive mind Letterboxd remains a breath of fresh air, even after absolutely exploding in popularity over the past few years. Alexandra Kleeman gets at the unique charm of the app/site, as well as the denizens who have contributed to its IMAX-tent appeal.
In the lists and “challenges” that populate the site — for example, the Criterion challenge, where users find and watch a Criterion Collection movie that fits each of 52 different categories like “Technicolor” or “Directed by Luis Bunuel” — you can glimpse different styles of engagement with cinema history, fandom or connoisseurship and try them out in your own life. Users follow along as PUNQ, a Norwegian rumored to have broken the Guinness world record for movie-watching, logged over 1,500 feature films last year, all from 1953 or 1954. They keep up with a Midwesterner named Jess who has watched Danny Boyle’s action-thriller 127 Hours, about a trapped rock climber, more than a thousand times. (Her Letterboxd handle is, appropriately, 127 Hours Girl.) Accounts like Solidarity Cinema, whose vast catalog of leftist, radical and queer films acts as a sort of community-access index tagged with terms like “communist,” “anarchist” and “Indigenous,” help users discover politically charged work. These distinctive relationships to movie-watching are invitations to experiment with and broaden one’s own film consumption and sense of taste.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/06/letterboxd-nyt-magazine/
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