How filmclub works

The full reference. If you're just starting out, read the Getting Started page instead — this one's for when you want to know exactly what something means.

The basics

A round is one film, start to finish: someone picks it, everyone watches it on their own time, everyone logs a reaction, everyone guesses everyone else, then it all unlocks and you discuss it.

A club is a group of up to 4 people who run rounds together. Small on purpose — everyone's voice matters at that size.

Round statuses

• Setup — a movie's being picked, or people are still watching. Nothing's unlocked yet.
• Screened — everyone's submitted their reaction. The reveal is unlocked: you can see everyone's ratings, hot takes, and how the guesses landed.
• Wrapped — the club has met and discussed it, and it's been marked done.

Logging your reaction

After watching, you log a few things:

Overall, Craft, Enjoyment — three separate 1–6 ratings.

• Overall is your bottom-line take.
• Craft is "how well made is this," independent of whether you personally liked it.
• Enjoyment is purely "did I have a good time."

Why two axes instead of one number: they capture different things. A film can be brilliantly made and still not be for you ("I can see it's great, just not my thing"), or be sloppy and still be a blast. Splitting them out means both of those are honest, complete answers instead of forcing a compromise number.

Why 1–6 and not 1–5: an even scale has no exact middle, so you have to lean one way or the other. It produces more honest, more useful data than everyone defaulting to a safe "3."

Outside my usual — a yes/no: was this a genre, era, or style you wouldn't normally reach for? This is the number that feeds your Comfort Zone stat and The Passport badge. Be honest with it either way — there's no wrong answer, it's just tracking your own range over time.

Would have picked it myself — yes/no, a quick read on whether this pick matched your taste.

Finished it — yes/no. Didn't finish it? Say so. Honesty here is worth more than a perfect completion streak (see Walked Out, below).

First time or rewatch — just context.

What did it leave you with — pick 1–2 feelings from a set (moved, unsettled, exhilarated, bored, cold, provoked, comforted, hollow, entertained). This is what powers your club's "emotional weather" chart — what kind of films tend to hit this group, and how.

Hot take — free text, hidden until the reveal like everything else. Say the real thing.

Guessing your clubmates

Before you see anyone else's answers, you guess how each clubmate felt: liked, so-so, or disliked. One tap, and it locks immediately — no going back and changing it once you've seen how close you were. That's the whole point: it's a genuine guess, not a hedge.

The reveal

Once everyone's submitted, the round moves to Screened and everything unlocks at once — nobody sees anything early, nobody sees anything late. You'll see:

• Everyone's ratings and hot takes
• Whether each guess was right, shown per person: "correctly read by 3 of 3"

Re-rating after discussion

Once your club has actually talked about the film, whoever's running the round can mark it Wrapped. That prompts everyone: want to update your rating now that you've talked it over? Yes or no, entirely optional.

If you say yes, you re-rate the overall score only (not craft/enjoyment/feelings — just your bottom-line take). Your original rating is never erased — it's kept alongside the new one, so the app can show how much the conversation actually moved you.

This is the "discussion effect" — the thing a plain star rating can never show. A film that climbs after people talk about it is doing exactly what a film club is for.

Reading the charts

Feeling bars (your dashboard / club stats) — ranked bars showing which feelings come up most often for you or your club. Longest bar = most common reaction. Tells you what kind of films this room actually responds to.

Rating histogram — a column for each rating value 1–6, height = how many ratings landed there. Tall columns in the middle-high range = a generous room; spread evenly = a room with real range in its opinions.

Comfort orbit — each dot is a film. Closer to the center = felt familiar to most people; further out = more people marked it outside their usual. The percentage is how much of your watching has been a genuine stretch.

Taste by mass — genres as circles, sized by how much you've watched. Bigger circle, more of that genre in your history. What's missing is as telling as what's there.

The discussion effect (slope chart) — each line is one film, left side is the gut reaction, right side is after talking it through. Line goes up = the film grew on the room; down = it fell apart under discussion.

Divisiveness — how far apart people's ratings were on a given film. A wide split isn't a bad thing — it usually means a better conversation.

All charts use one color per club member, consistent everywhere they appear — check the legend once and you'll recognize who's who across every chart.

Badges

Each badge tracks something real about how you watch, computed automatically after every round:

• Out of Comfort Zone — lifetime count of films you marked outside your usual. Never resets.
• Completionist — a streak of consecutive finished films. Unlike the others, this one can go down: walking out on one breaks it. It rewards a current run, not a lifetime tally.
• Walked Out — earned the first time you're honest about not finishing something. One-time badge, not a count.
• Split Personality — for films where your craft and enjoyment ratings landed far apart. Tracks how often you can separate "well made" from "I liked it."
• The Reader — how often you correctly guess a clubmate's reaction. Needs at least 5 resolved guesses in a club before it shows, so it's not misleading on a tiny sample.
• Contrarian — how often your rating landed noticeably far from everyone else's average. Being the outlier, tracked honestly.
• The Passport — one stamp per distinct non-English language you've watched a film in. English doesn't count as a stamp, since it's the default most people are already saturated in — this badge is about how far you've actually traveled beyond that.

Except for Completionist, every badge is a lifetime total — it never decreases. A quiet year doesn't erase what you've already earned.

Leaving, joining, and leadership

See Leading a Club for what a club owner is responsible for, and how leadership can be handed off or reclaimed.

Something confusing that isn't covered here? That's useful to know — it means this page needs an update.