Kinolog

Movie night

The forty minutes you spend choosing is the movie night.

Two people, two streaming subscriptions, and an hour of scrolling that ends in something nobody wanted. The problem is not that there is nothing to watch. It is that neither of you can hold the other person’s taste in your head while you scroll.

How it works

  1. One of you keeps a diary. Log what you watch, with a rating and a line about it if you feel like it. That diary is the taste Kinolog reads, and importing a Letterboxd export fills it in one upload.
  2. The other one rates a handful of films. You send them a link. They tap through some famous films, about a minute of work, with no account, no app and nothing shared back to you except the taste those answers describe.
  3. Kinolog picks for the room, not for one of you. It scores films against both tastes at once, rewards what you agree on, sinks anything either of you would dislike, and leaves out everything either of you has already seen.
  4. It tells you why. Every pick names the films in your own diaries it leaned on, so you can disagree with it for a reason rather than shrug.

Only one of you needs an account

That asymmetry is the point. Getting somebody to install an app before a film starts is a losing argument, so the person you invite never has to. They open a link and answer a few questions. If they already use Kinolog they can link their own diary instead, and then it is reading two real histories rather than one history and a sketch.

Try it before you sign up for anything

The fastest way to see whether this reads you correctly is the no-account demo: tap through some films you know and it will tell you something about your taste, then hand you picks. Movie night is the same engine with two people in the room.

Try it, no accountStart a diary

Once you have a diary, movie night lives on the home screen: add whoever is on the couch, send them their link, and it picks.

Why not just use a “what to watch” generator

Because a generator does not know either of you. Kinolog predicts the rating you personally would give a film, from the films you have already rated, and it keeps score on itself: the number is stated before you watch and settled against what you actually thought afterwards. It also never suggests something you have already seen, which is the failure that makes most recommenders feel like they are guessing. How the recommendations work.

More on the rest of it in the guide, or what the diary itself does.