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So you’ve got a group of friends or family coming over to hang. With the holidays coming up, we expect lots of you will be looking for ways to entertain guests and loved ones — but a lot of you don’t necessarily own a big DVD collection anymore. In the age of film streaming services, you may not have the best movies on hand physically.
That said, one of downsides of Netflix and Amazon Prime are they offer an embarrassment of riches — there are a lot of great movies to watch, and it can be a bit overwhelming making up your mind. Also, there’s no way of knowing what’s on either site unless you’re willing to do a lot of browsing or already know what you want to search for.
That’s why we think Flickmetrix is an essential website for all movie-lovers to bookmark.
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This website, originally called Cinesift, began as a Rotten Tomatoes competitor, made by British software developer Mike Fox, who told Motherboard, “I want this site to help others find new films, and find out where they can watch those films.”
Flickmetrix collects ratings on movies from Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Letterboxd, and Metacritic, and puts them into one big rating. It then shows which of those movies are available to watch on Netflix or Prime.
You can also set which era of film you want to search for (I’m partial to movies from the 1930s, personally) and what average rating you want to see. You can also use more advanced options to search for films with a high Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb rating specifically, or to look for a film from a particular genre or related to a keyword.
Some of the finer details of the site will really help cinephiles find the subject of their next watch party. For example, if you use a Flickmetrix account, you can keep track of favorite movies and movies you’ve seen. If you live outside the US, you can switch which Netflix region to search within.
Flickmetrix doesn’t cover all the great sites — there are classic films on Hulu and HBO as well. It also doesn’t cover more niche sites such as the fledgling Criterion Channel. But if you’re one of the millions of people who have two of the most popular streaming services in the world, then it’s the place to find the next best thing to watch.
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