When my first feature I Like Movies was set to premiere at TIFF in 2022, I was terrified of Letterboxd. The film was a portrait of an obsessive teen cinephile who gets a job at a video store in 2003 and eventually comes to terms with the fact that he is a pretentious asshole. I knew I’d made the kind of movie that young cinephiles would either love or hate, and the needy, insecure worms that control my brain were betting on the latter. 

At the premiere of the film, I took one inhale and exhaled as the end credits came up. The response seemed positive, but I was in a total daze. The after-party, full of everyone I’d ever known, felt like I was witnessing my own wedding, or maybe my funeral. I couldn’t cope with the postpartum depression of releasing something into the world that had lived inside of me for five years. Did I birth a strong and powerful child who was destined to live a long and happy life? Or were they a dud?

Right before I went to sleep that night, happy but drunk and overwhelmed, I clicked on the I Like Movies Letterboxd page, despite my friend’s warnings. There were floods and floods of reviews, so kind and effusive that I wanted to cry. The screenings had sold out within the first 30 seconds of the festival. Critics had reviewed it kindly. But it was Letterboxd that finally made my film’s success feel real.

Over the next year, as I traveled to festivals in Norway, Argentina, Taiwan, France and Cleveland, I kept refreshing the Letterboxd page, copying and pasting I Like Movies reviews into Google Translate, learning about what I had made. Sometimes people were lovely and funny, writing reviews I’d dreamt of receiving. Sometimes, they eviscerated the film and left no crumbs. One or two people hit on me. It was all valuable feedback. 

Filmmakers: they’re just like me for real.

“Making movies is like the one profession where if you’re really, really good, everybody gets to witness you learning in public,” says director and Letterboxd member Michael Mohan. At SXSW this year, Mohan will release his third feature, Immaculate. It’s a stylish, erotic thriller about a nun (played by Mohan’s muse, Sydney Sweeney) who gets pregnant at an Italian convent. The high-octane trailer makes it seem reminiscent of both Abel Ferrara and Pier Paolo Pasolini. After two prior indie features (Save the Date, The Voyeurs) and a one-season TV show released on Netflix (Everything Sucks!), Immaculate is Mohan’s first movie to get a wide theatrical release by NEON.

I love living inside the Mohan universe, but he’s no stranger to getting savage beatdowns on Letterboxd. The Voyeurs, which is one of my favorite erotic thrillers of the current century, has a 2.6-out-of-five-star rating. Unlike some filmmakers, who say you should never read your reviews, Mohan said Letterboxd made him a better one. 

“Sure, my dopamine receptors are all fucked up from Letterboxd, and with the last film, my skin is thick now,” says Mohan, who said he still checks his own movies’ pages every two months. “But there’s no doubt in my mind this new film is a cut above. Part of that was because I was able to listen to all the reactions of what people liked and didn’t respond to in the work.”

“I noticed myself ignoring the good reviews and fixating on the bad ones,” said Romvari. “I could have ten great reviews and one person would be like, ‘Who made this student film bullshit?’, and it just hit me like a gut punch.” The filmmaker even sent her parents the Still Processing Letterboxd page. It ended up being a breakthrough moment in their relationship that validated her as an artist. 

“Just with the stigma around grief and losing children, it was nice for my parents to see people being really kind about it and so effusive,” said Romvari. “My dad’s always just like, ‘How do you not get a big head?’ because someone will write, ‘Romvari is the new Truffaut,’ and you’ve gotta be like, ‘OK, settle down, you’re like, fourteen.’”

Working in the film industry while critiquing movies means conflicts aplenty. Filmmaker and Letterboxd member Daniel Goldhaber, who released his second feature—the arresting eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline—with NEON in 2023 and is in post-production on his new horror adaptation of Faces of Death, recounts a lunch with a charming executive in Los Angeles. 

“We realized we both had Letterboxd and I said, ‘We should follow each other!’ I went home and thought, ‘Oh, I wonder what she wrote about my first film because she said, ‘I really like Cam.’ So I went to her profile and she’d given it two stars,” he laughs. “We’re actually still very good friends.”

Despite the awkward moment, Goldhaber really believes in getting audience feedback. “I think that there are filmmakers who don’t necessarily want to know how an audience reacts,” he says. “But I do think of myself as a populist filmmaker in the sense that I want to make entertainment that is received on a wide scale. Even in the release of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I was able to see over the course of its festival life, in real time, how people were reacting to the film. You get feedback from the Q&As you do, which helps you learn how to talk about the film. But that doesn’t mean that it’s always healthy.” 

If you’re lucky enough to be making work that is actively programmed at film festivals, I implore you to try to pay it forward by championing your peers on Letterboxd. All three filmmakers recommend “hearting” a movie instead of rating it out of five. Acknowledging who you know on the production and writing a kind or constructive review if you want to boost a title, instead of pointing out its flaws, is the way to go.

“People’s emotions are fragile and delicate,” said Goldhaber. “Outside of big, corporate studio entertainment, I never want to hurt another movie. So I try to use the platform as an opportunity to direct people towards other work that they might find exciting or interesting.”

“Once you start logging movies, you start thinking about what you’re watching in a bit more of an academic way,” says Goldhaber. “I started really pushing myself to watch work that I found to be more challenging, and it made it harder for movies to just be a source of escapism.”

Michael Mohan compares the Letterboxd app to a food diary. “I get fulfillment by having a balanced, cinematic diet of equal parts Criterion Collection and trash,” he says. “It keeps me accountable when that 4K set of the Red, White and Blue trilogy arrives. I’m like, ‘I need to do this because everyone can see that I’ve only watched shitty ’80s movies.’”

Romvari admits that she is now consciously trying to feel her way through reviewing a movie, instead of jumping on the bandwagon. “For a long time, I wasn’t using star ratings because I was finding them too distracting. I’d be watching a movie and thinking, ‘Oh, this is maybe a three, three-point-five’. Or ‘Here’s the joke I’m going to write about the film afterwards,’ or, ‘What does everyone else think?’ Now, I’m trying to watch movies in a more smooth-brain way where I just try to consider, ‘What is my emotional experience watching this?’”

Indeed, reviewing movies gives you time to notice aspects of the craft, or catch interesting details that you can later repurpose in your work. Mohan likes to write personal notes to himself on Letterboxd so he doesn’t lose unlikely sources of inspiration. “I just watched this film, Voyage of the Rock Aliens, which is not good,” Mohan laughs. “But there was this one bit of business where one of the tough guys is sitting at the bar, but rather than nursing a beer, he’s nursing a jar of maraschino cherries. And he’s punctuating his dialogue by, like, stabbing a toothpick in the jar of maraschino cherries and putting it in his mouth. And that is the brilliant bit of business that I want to steal, so I made a private note on Letterboxd.”

It’s also true that in an era where many sources of film criticism are eroding, and when the long tail of the pandemic combined with economic vagaries keep indie films’ in-cinema prospects dicey, your movie’s Letterboxd page may be the only source of constructive feedback an indie filmmaker can easily access. 

Finnish director Alli Haapasalo, whose debut feature Girl Picture premiered at Sundance during the pandemic in 2022, told Letterboxd’s Jack Moulton at the time, “The festival was all online, so we had no way of reading the room at our very first screening. When people started publishing their reviews on Letterboxd, a connection to the audience opened. I can’t tell you how grateful we felt reading people’s feedback about having related to the film.”

Michael Mohan has longed to see a work of his play in a cinema, ever since a chance encounter in 2005 semi-changed his life. “I was at a movie theater in Century City, and I’m standing in line when Quentin Tarantino comes in. I think he was seeing Mystic River,” Mohan recalls. “And I remember watching as Quentin turned to his friends and said, ‘I just want to see how she’s doing.’ He giddily skipped down the hallway and peeked his head in the back of the auditorium where one of the Kill Bills was playing. In that moment, I was like, ‘That’s the fucking dream right there.’”

A week away from Immaculate’s premiere at SXSW 2024, Mohan finally feels like he is living that dream. “I’m about to release my third film, and it’s the only one that will ever play in theaters,” he said. “So in the streaming era, where not everything gets a wide theatrical release, I feel like Letterboxd is the only way we get to peek into the back of the theater to see how our films are doing.”

Death of community or death of ego?

As a first-time filmmaker, it can be scary to see how audiences genuinely feel about something you’ve made. Do it enough, and you feel like an anthropologist.

Over the past year, I’ve done post-screening Q&As of my feature for grandmas in Owen Sound as part of TIFF’s Film Circuit program (they wanted to know “why I had to include all that swearing”); for ultra-chic cineastes at the inaugural Nouvelle Vagues film festival in Biarritz, France (no one laughed at a single joke and I had to lie in the sand for a while); and for a class of Taiwanese high-school students in Taipei on my 36th birthday (a scene where my main character masturbates while watching Spartacus provoked a reaction akin to how audiences in the 1800s reacted to that Lumière Brothers’ reel about the train). 

I’ve caught the person sitting beside me start watching my film on the Air Canada in-flight movie service, then stop it in favor of John Wick: Chapter 4, which I honestly respect. I’ve lurked in the shadows waiting to go on stage as audience members walked out complaining while the credits were still rolling. And I’ve also been the filmmaker talking to someone through their tears. There have been several Letterboxd reviews that have made me feel proud and humbled to be an artist. But I also tend to “heart” all the mean ones because I am that bitch. 

“Something that we’ve had over the last ten years in every medium, but especially in film, is a death of community,” said Goldhaber. “Letterboxd is one of the few spaces that still feels, despite having certain problems with any kind of internet space, like a genuine hub for cinephiles that hasn’t yet been taken over by venture capital and the algorithm… So it’s like, as a filmmaker, do you want to be a part of that community or not?”

Choose life. Choose community. Choose Letterboxd.