Now playing: “Oh, What a World” by Kacey Musgraves

Hello from New York City, where we spring is springing enough that we watched the Knicks vs 76ers game on Friday outside at a packed beer garden. Famed Hong Kong New Wave actor Tony Leung just stopped by the city, and his words from a recent Q&A may be a future topic of this newsletter.

It's so in vogue to dislike your phone and social media that I almost feel wary of admitting this, but I have a favorite social media app on my phone. To the surprise of nobody, it's Letterboxd, the place where many keep track of the movies they've seen, movies they want to see and those they want to see.

Before the Knicks game on Friday night, when I was rattling off my statistics for movies, someone asked me if I was getting all of my details from some ChatGPT or something. Rather than start a monologue about how I don't do that, I just explained it was all from my Letterboxd. But in this moment, it's a good time to go over what the heck is happening with Letterboxd, as Semafor's Max Tani reports that Canadian holding company Tiny, the controlling investor in Letterboxd "is looking to sell its stake in a company that plays a powerful and growing role in the global film business."

While this has me worried that a major conglomerate will buy it and either stuff it full of AI or allow it to stagnate faster than you can say “Goodreads,” this made me feel like now's a good time to take a critical eye to Letterboxd’s flaws with my feature wishlist. Time to talk about the site's potential as the connective tissue for movies, movie lovers, movie theaters, and physical media.

Two of these feel like table-stakes for the future, one is clearly just pie-in-the-sky thinking, and the rest ... are nice to haves. But the thing is I know plenty of people don't care about Letterboxd, so I've decided to explain how these ideas apply to all of us. Maybe those little bits are too much, I don't know.

I started outlining this newslettr because Nora reminded me of my personal pick for the biggest overall flaw in Letterboxd. While users can comment on a review, nobody can reply directly to a comment. That means all comments sit as one little — or giant, as is the case with bigger accounts — stack of messages that is an incoherent conversation. 

So, please, current or future Letterboxd management, enough is enough, and it's time for a change. I don't know exactly how to fix it, and if you can implement anything without erasing past comments, but there should be a way to have a reply button next to username, which would generate an @ mention for them. And then change the default notification settings for posts you've commented on, which currently have me getting a notification for the 27 other replies to Sean Fennessey's review of "Father Mother Sister Brother" which got attention because he said Charli XCX was in the same screening room.

How does this apply to us all? Rethink all of the ways you try and reach out to a whole group of people at once for the sake of efficiency. You pay more attention when someone contacts you directly, right? Don't let old ways of communication sabotage your ties to folks.

On the complete inverse, though, unless you're friends or family are the kind of people who love random asides and memes (keep that stuff to the Instagram inbox, the least serious one), you need to limit your texts to what matters. I know this for a fact because I'm just as guilty as anyone about it.

But I bring this up because of Letterboxd's terrible way it handles letting you know about online streaming availability from the movies in your Watchlist. Unless you choose the email alert feature, which you should, opening notifications like the above just send you to one of those movies. Not to a list of all of the movies (because what are those other 7 movies?), but one of them. And before you say "just swipe or navigate back and tap..." ... no.

Once you open that notification, you should get a list of all of the movies it's referring to. Each should have their current streaming service icons listed next to them, and you should be able to click on them to open. This is sort of like what you get on email, but it shouldn't just be on email. 

This should be obvious, but it's not. 

Then, there's the stuff that isn't obvious, but should be given proactively to the people who you're spending time with or working with, because it helps build connections. 

In order for me to figure out how many movies I've seen this year in theaters and at home, I need to have been using tags to represent that in each logged film, something I already do. But on top of that, you have to go through the following steps, and you have to do them in a web browser, not the app.

Now, you'll see a top-line note that says something akin to "You’ve logged 90 entries for films tagged ‘in-theaters’ during 2026." I also tagged 55 entries with ‘home,’ so that should give you an idea of how I've got a 2:1 ratio for my activity. 

But I couldn't pull those numbers when I was out and about, because this process is far from memorable and the sort of confusing thing that's left me tapping furiously as I try and get answers for someone I'm talking to in person. Especially since, as I noted, this doesn't work the same way in the app. 

If you ask me, year-by-year breakdowns should be shown on screen after you've opened a tag.

This one's kinda simple for explaining, we all cannot just live online and at home. Need I say more? 

And Letterboxd used to almost understand this, as showtimes for movies in theaters used to be in Letterboxd, but now I can't find them. In addition to fixing that, Watchlist availability notifications should also include alerts when movies are coming to theaters. To make that even better, it would be great if you could enter your zip code to learn when films were announced for repertory programming nearby. 

Deals with major theaters could allow for faster logging with QR codes on the way out the door. 

It can get really difficult to keep track of your belongings, and so we come to the topic of physical media, which I've saved for last because not everyone who uses Letterboxd is in the DVD, Blu-ray and 4K-buying demographic. 

Letterboxd is aware its audience contains our ilk, and has published articles with tips to prove it. That said, I'd absolutely love it if Letterboxd grew a whole new library feature, similar to what CLZ Movies does. The ability to scan a barcode, add a film to one of your lists, and have the release details (imprint, format, release date) automatically placed in the details field, would be excellent. 

Thank you for reading this far.

Next time, we’re talking about compliments.