Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons, patterns and highlights.
Last year: Zvi’s 2024 In Movies.
You can find all my ratings and reviews on Letterboxd. I do revise from time to time, either on rewatch or changing my mind. I encourage you to follow me there.
Letterboxd ratings go from 0.5-5. The scale is trying to measure several things at once.
5: Masterpiece. All-time great film. Will rewatch multiple times. See this film.
4.5: Excellent. Life is meaningfully enriched. Want to rewatch. Probably see this film.
4: Great. Cut above. Very happy I saw. Happy to rewatch. If interested, see this film.
3.5: Very Good. Actively happy I saw. Added value to my life. A worthwhile time.
3: Good. Happy that I saw it, but wouldn’t be a serious mistake to miss it.
2.5: Okay. Watching this was a small mistake.
2: Bad. I immediately regret this decision. Kind of a waste.
1.5: Very bad. If you caused this to exist, you should feel bad. But something’s here.
1: Atrocious. Total failure. Morbid curiosity is the only reason to finish this.
0.5: Crime Against Cinema. Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
The ratings are intended as a bell curve. It’s close, but not quite there due to selection of rewatches and attempting to not see the films that are bad:
Trying to boil ratings down to one number destroys a lot of information.
Given how much my ratings this year conflict with critics opinions, I asked why this was, and I think I mostly have an explanation now.
There are several related but largely distinct components. I think the basic five are:
Traditional critic movie ratings tend, from my perspective, to overweight #1, exhibit predictable strong biases in #3 and #5, and not care enough about #2. They also seem to cut older movies, especially those pre-1980 or so, quite a lot of unearned slack.
Scott Sumner picks films with excellent Quality, but cares little for so many other things that once he picks a movie to watch our ratings don’t even seem to correlate. We have remarkably opposite tastes. Him giving a 3.7 to The Phoenician Scheme is the perfect example of this. Do I see why he might do that? Yes. But a scale that does that doesn’t tell me much I can use.
Order within a ranking is meaningful.
Any reasonable algorithm is going to be very good at differentially finding the best movies to see, both for you and in general. As you see more movies, you deplete the pool of both existing and new movies. That’s in addition to issues of duplication.
In 2024, I watched 36 new movies. In 2025, I watched 51 new movies. That’s enough of an expansion that you’d expect substantially decreasing returns. If anything, things held up rather well. My average rating only declined from 3.1 to 3.01 (if you exclude one kids movie I was ‘forced’ to watch) despite my disliking many of the year’s most loved films.
My guess is I could have gotten up to at least 75 before I ran out of reasonable options.
See The Naked Gun unless you hate fun. If you hated the original Naked Gun, or Airplane, that counts as hating fun. But otherwise, yes, I understand that this is not the highest Quality movie of the year, but this is worthy, see it.
You should almost certainly see Bogunia and Companion.
See Thunderbolts* unless you are automatically out on all Marvel movies ever.
See A Big, Bold Beautiful Journey unless you hate whimsical romantic comedies or are a stickler for traditional movie reviews.
See Sorry, Baby and Hamnet, and then Sentimental Value, if you are willing to spend that time being sad.
See Novocaine and then maybe The Running Man if you want to spend that time watching action, having fun and being happy instead.
See Relay if you want a quiet thriller.
See Oh, Hi!, Splitsville and Materialists if you want to look into some modern dating dynamics in various ways, in that order or priority.
See Wick is Pain if and only if you loved the John Wick movies.
The world would be better if everyone saw A House of Dynamite.
I anticipate that Marty Supreme belongs on this list, it counts as ‘I’m in,’ but due to holidays and the flu I haven’t been able to go out and see it yet. The over/under is at Challengers.
This helps you understand my biases, and helps me remember them as well.
That leaves six remarkably well reviewed movies, all of which are indeed very high on Quality, where I disagreed with the consensus, and had my rating at 3 or less. In order of Quality as I would rank them, they are: One Battle After Another, Sinners, Black Bag, Train Dreams, Weapons and Frankenstein.
A strategy I think would work well for all six of those, at the risk of some spoilage, is to watch the trailer. If you respond to that trailer with ‘I’m in’ then be in. If not, not.
The predictive power of critical reviews, at least for me, took a nosedive in 2025. One reason is that the ratings clearly got more generous in general. Average Metacritic, despite my watching more movies, went from 61 → 66, Letterboxd went 3.04 → 3.33. Those are huge jumps given the scales.
In 2024, Letterboxd or Metacritic ratings were 48% and 46% correlated with my final ratings, respectively. This year that declined to 33% and 38%, and I discovered the best was actually Rotten Tomatoes at 44%, with IMDB at 42%.
If you consider only movies where I gave a rating of 2.5 or more, filtering out what I felt were actively bad movies, the correlation dropped to 1% and 6%, or 3% for IMDB, or -4% (!) for Rotten Tomatoes. Essentially all of the value of critics was in identifying which things sucked, and from my perspective the rest was noise.
Rotten Tomatoes is a one trick pony. It warns you about things that might suck.
Even more than before, you have to adjust critic ratings for whether critics will overrate or underrate a movie of this type and with this subject matter. You can often have a strong sense of why the critics would put up a given number, without having to read reviews and thus risk spoilers.
Using multiple sources, and looking at their relative scores, helps with this as well. A relatively high IMDB score, even more than Letterboxd, tells you that the audience and the movie are well-matched. That can be good news, or that can be bad news.
Last year there were movies where I disagreed with the review consensus, but I always understood why in both directions. I might think Megalopolis is Coppola’s masterpiece despite its problems, but don’t get me wrong, I see the problems.
This year I mostly get why they liked the ‘overrated six’ above, but there are several cases where I do not know what they were thinking, and I think the critical consensus is objectively wrong even by its own standards.
I haven’t found a solution to the problem of ‘how do you check reviews without spoiling the movie?’ given that the average score itself can be a spoiler, but also I notice I haven’t tried that hard. With advances in LLMs and also vibe coding, I clearly should try again.
The power of ‘I’m in’ peaked in 2024.
The rule for ‘I’m in’ is:
That year, there were 6 movies where in advance I said ‘I’m in,’ and they were 6 of my top 9 movies for the year.
This year the power of ‘I’m in’ was still strong, but less reliable. I’d count 10 such movies this year, including 4 of my ultimate top 5, but the other 6 did not break into the 4+ range, and there was a 3 and a 2.5. That’s still a great deal, especially given how many movies where it seemed like one ‘should’ be excited, I noticed I wasn’t, and that proved correct, including One Battle After Another, Black Bag, Weapons and Sinners.
I wonder: How much of the power of ‘I’m in’ is the attitude and thus is causal, versus it being a prediction? I have low confidence in this.
I control for this effect when giving ratings, but the experience is much better in a theater, maybe good for an experiential boost of ~0.3 points on the 0.5-5 point scale. That’s big. I have to consciously correct for it when rating movies I watch at home.
I highly recommend getting a membership that makes marginal cost $0, such as the AMC A-List or the similar deal at Regal Cinemas. This helps you enjoy the movie and decide to see them more.
Unlike last year, there were remarkably many movies that are in green on Metacritic, but that I rated 2.5 or lower, and also a few of the 3s require explanation as per above.
I don’t know how this happened, but an active majority of the movies I rated below 3 had a Metacritic score above 60. That’s bizarre.
Minor spoilers throughout, I do my best to limit it to minor ones, I’ll do the 3s sorted by Metacritic, then the others sorted by Metacritic.
Now the ones I actively disliked:
There are four movies requiring explanation on the upside, where they were below 60 on Metacritic yet I actively liked them.
All four seem like clear cases of ‘yes I know that technically this is lacking in some important way but the movie is fun, damn it, how can you not see this?’
You can say the same thing about The Naked Gun. It has a 75, perfectly respectable, but its joke hit rate per minute is absurd, it is worth so much more than that.
I once again used consideration for awards as one selection criteria for picking movies. This helped me ‘stay in the conversation’ with others at various points, and understand the state of the game. But once again it doesn’t seem to have provided more value than relying on Metacritic and Letterboxd ratings, especially if you also used IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.
Last year I was very happy with Anora ending up on top. This year I’m not going to be happy unless something very surprising happens. But I do understand. In my word, given the rules of the game, I’d have Bogunia sweep the major awards.
I’m very happy with this side hobby, and I expect to see over one new movie a week again in 2026. It was a disappointing year in some ways, but looking back I still got a ton of value, and my marginal theater experience was still strongly positive. I think it’s also excellent training data, and a great way to enforce a break from everything.
It would be cool to find more good people to follow on Letterboxd, so if you think we’d mesh there, tag yourself for that in the comments.