Hello friends,

Blockbuster season is upon us—time to flee the multiplex and get stuck into your lists of guilty pleasures and favorite 80s movies.

You may have spotted a few improvements around the site (more on those below) and we've added a new section to this email (The Crowd Roars) in which we trawl your ranked lists looking for potentially interesting tidbits.

Happy watching,
The Letterboxd crew

Opening Credits

In cinemas and coming soon
Warcraft Image
Warcraft

Son of Bowie and man of Moon, Duncan Jones, has brought the hefty Warcraft to the screen at last. He won the job when he declared that both sides of the story—human and orc—needed to be told with equal weight. If you’re up to speed on Warcraft lore, you’ll most likely find the film to be “liquid crack for the fanboy eyeballs”, if not, it’s an “once-in-a-generation disaster”.

The Fits

Under the direction of Anna Rose Holmer, indie sport-dance film The Fits introduces the magnetic Royalty Hightower as 11 year old tomboy Toni, who joins a competitive dance team beset by a mysterious horror: “a beautiful story about the end of adolescence, the resilience of minority communities... gender and family.”

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Based on a classic New Zealand comic novel about a boy and his foster uncle who go on the run, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is directed by Taika Waititi (What We Do In The Shadows and the forthcoming Thor: Ragnarok). Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill plays the uncle, and there’s a cameo from Rhys Darby. It opens in the US this week and will keep rolling out around the world from there.

Independence Day: Resurgence

Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman are back, the POTUS is a woman, and… excuse our yawns but even though they had “twenty years to prepare”, Independence Day: Resurgence looks like the laziest blockbuster sequel since The Expendables 3.

Captain Fantastic

Viggo Mortenson and six children go bush in Captain Fantastic, a meditation on modern fatherhood, suburbia and ethical ways of living. “Viggo made me cry and feel all the things.”

For more upcoming releases and trailers, go fishing near The Trailer Park, a list regularly updated by Phips. You might find Dory.

The Insider

Behind the scenes at HQ

It’s been a big month! First up, and coinciding nicely with Pride month, we added a pronoun option to your account settings that’s used when we refer to you in activity text and elsewhere. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and we were thrilled to be able to do this in an inclusive manner. More background in our News post.

We’ve also brought back Netflix availabilty, and added 20 more services (including Amazon Prime, Hulu, Google Play and YouTube) thanks to our pals at GoWatchIt. You’ll find a “More Services” option in the availability panel on a film’s page, available to all visitors, and if you’re a Pro member, you can also use this list of services to filter any of our poster views, including lists, watchlists, cast/crew filmographies, the Films section and more. (Amazon and iTunes still support a number of global stores, but the data for other services is US-only for the time being.)

Lastly, version 1.1 of our iPhone app just went live in the App Store. It includes list creation and editing, plus a host of other new features and improvements. Once you’ve installed and used the new version, we would be grateful for any new or updated reviews in the App Store!

Star Wars

One star vs five stars, fight!
The Nice Guys

The Nice Guys

★ “Terrible all the way around. Casting/performances uniformly bad. 70s details stale and off. Writing tired and unfunny. Action scenes edited more like their contemporaries which means fast cuts and very little choreography/blocking. Just a tedious slog. Only decent performance was from Russell Crowe. How do you cast Keith David and underutilize him? Clearly Shane Black thought he was making his Chinatown (a movie about 70s LA conspiracy made in 2016) but can you imagine anything more stale than a porn cover-up plot in a period noir piece? Give me a break! There were a few funny lines—that's it.” —eugeugeug

★★★★★

“Any buddy cop movie lives or dies on the strength of its central performances, and Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are surprisingly brilliant together… And yet this team wouldn’t be half as good without the third member, March’s daughter Holly, played excellently by Angourie Rice. Having a teenage girl who can be much more competent than the men really adds spark to the film’s dynamic, and allows the film some character development, not only in the Marchs’ father-daughter relationship but in Holly’s questioning of whether Healy is a good man…” —Kieron Moore

An honorable mention also to this crass, one-sentence, five-star review.

Old School

Recent reviews of the classics
The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes

“Films about artists often struggle to sell the audience on the greatness of its fictional artist. If you are telling the audience a character is a great poet, then you had better be ready to produce some great poetry. Here, Powell and Pressburger give us the greatest cinematic depiction of the ballet that has yet been made, thanks to a cast of actual ballet dancers (no need for CGI or fancy editing tricks). The fantastic depiction of the ballet The Red Shoes, which is allowed a lot of space to breathe, never becomes dull; one feels one is watching a genuinely great ballet production, that at times moves from being a filmed stage performance to a more impressionistic one.

“Fittingly for a story about ballet, this is an operatic story in all respects. This is a melodrama, in the best sense of the word. Anton Walbrook, the standout in Powell and Pressburger's Colonel Blimp, returns to give another superb performance here (as one of the few actors not required to dance), as a man who demands the sacrifice of the personal for the artistic. The central dilemma of the climax, and its tragic outcome, can be read as the result either of the clash of two ideas, or the clash of two men who let their egos get the best of them and in the process destroy what they claim to love.” —Sean Curley

Broadcast News

LETTERBOXD FAMILY PODCASTS, VLOGS & MORE

Never mind the blogs, here are the YouTube channels. Letterboxd user and movie vlogger Bryan Lomax has begun a semi-regular weekly feature called Letterboxd Sundays, where he revisits the movies he has watched during the week, based on looking at his Letterboxd diary on Sundays.

Kat Kourbeti has started the Cinescapist TV YouTube channel where she reviews films and discusses retrospectives in a snappy, quick video round-up.

And prolific vlogger Jonathan Paula hosts Movie Night, which includes reviews of new releases mixed in with topics like Most Confusing Time Travel Movies Ever.

Let us know about your podcast, vlog, app, crowdfunding project or anything else the Letterboxd community needs to know about by replying to this email.

The Crowd Roars

Insights from the ranks

As more and more members have added ranked lists to Letterboxd, patterns of popularity have emerged. It’s not necessarily news that WALL·E (just) nudges out Toy Story as your most popular Pixar film, but it’s interesting to see the landslides in other lists. Read on…

WALL·E

From a total of 1,028 lists ranking Pixar’s films, WALL·E is named in the #1 spot in 17.2% of them, just beating Toy Story with 17%. That’s pretty cool considering Toy Story comes with sequels, a Randy Newman hit and way more merch. Poor old Cars 2—it was listed in the #1 spot by just one devoted fan. (No names!)

Mission: Impossible II

Was it Tom Cruise’s hair? The boring villains? The melodramatic script? The slow-motion doves? Whatever it was, it drove a staggering 84% of you to rank Mission: Impossible II as your least favorite mission in that franchise. Sorry, John Woo. We still love you.

This Is The End

The Land Before Time

Some epic list-making this month from Holly-Beth, who is working her way through a “pain in the ass” list of historical period dramas in chronological order, from The Land Before Time to The Social Network. She invites recommendations.

Dancer in the Dark

What’s your favourite shot ever? A Lonely Grape wants to know for his list that celebrates movie shots that took your breath away, or are “just really pretty”.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Feeling emotional? Johnny Shinobi has created a lovely set of themed lists anchored around certain states of being: faith, dignity, wistfulness, uncertainty and confusion, loyalty and betrayal.

The Greasy Strangler

A three-sentence, one-star review that kinda really makes us want to see The Greasy Strangler.