Where would we be as internet users if we weren’t constantly judging strangers? I would be lying if I said that being part of the jeering crowd wasn’t a contributing factor to why I keep coming back to Twitter (I’m one of the holdouts who refuses to say X) no matter how unusable it becomes. We’ve created entire internet mythos around mocking incredibly stupid things that total no-names have said. I should not vividly remember the Lockheed Martin nepo-baby hire who claimed it was “ableist” to tell authors they should read, and yet that memory has stood the test of time, whether I like it or not.
In some ways, this is the way the internet has always been. Viral video OGs like “Star Wars Kid” and “Fred Figglehorn” went from obscurity to infamy in what felt like seconds. They were scrutinized and cyberbullied mercilessly for the “crimes” of being fat or annoying, respectively. The backlash to viral sensations have always been sophomoric. Look at the comments of an Instagram reel by a body positive influencer in 2025 and it will look unsurprisingly similar to the response to the “Star Wars Kid” video in 2003. As much as they’d hate to admit it, many internet users never left high school. When you look at tweets and comments through that arrested development lens, the cruelty becomes much easier to understand. Every aspect of a person's social media can be analyzed and torn apart, no matter how unremarkable it may be.
So, what does this have to do with Letterboxd?
Letterboxd is an app where regular Joes like you and me can become film critics like Siskel and Ebert. You can log and rate movies from a ½ star to 5 star scale and write a review to let the world know exactly what you think about everything from A Trip to the Moon (1902), to the recent Best Picture winner Anora (2024). It’s essentially Goodreads for movies.
Ever since I’ve been a Letterboxd user (My first logged movie was Too Young to Be a Dad starring Paul Dano on November 3rd, 2020), there has been discourse about the right way to use it. Should your reviews evoke the writing stylings of Bosley Crowther and Pauline Kael, or should they be short, easily consumable, and more stylistically similar to tweets than a proper film review? If you ask the court of public opinion, the latter has easily won out as the quintessential Letterboxd review.
From a meme standpoint, it’s no wonder that something short, quotable, and funny would have more viral manpower than an earnest, in-depth essay. What’s actually notable about this phenomenon is the vitriol that serious Letterboxd reviewers have for those who really don’t have much to say.
It’s a timeless debate between the alleged nerdy snobs who want everyone to have high standards and the unserious populace. The nerds hate what the normies have done to their precious online space, and the normies by and large don’t care what the nerds think because they outnumber them anyway. Or do they? I’ve found that no matter what kind of Letterboxd reviewer you are, someone can and will find a way to scrutinize how you review a movie. Let’s take Letterboxd curves as an example.
Every film on Letterboxd has a curve. These curves are either positive or negative: A movie with a positive curve will have more four and five-star reviews than it has one and two-star reviews and vice versa. Individual users also have a curve showing whether they’re mostly rated the movies they’ve watched positively or negatively. There’s a growing group of Letterboxd users who are increasingly bitter about the small group of users who rate more movies negatively than they do positively.
To this discourse I have to say… Literally, who cares? Why does it bother 90-thousand people that some weirdo rates the majority of movies they watch with one star? Why are we seeking out the rare person who thinks basically every movie they watch is bad to point and laugh at them? Literally, what is the point?
You can ask the same question of the essayists: Why does it matter that a social media platform is surface-level and vacuous? Isn’t it good that the masses are sparing us with jokes instead of horrible essays that aren’t worth reading?
There is nothing objective about a 5-star rating scale. Everyone has their own idea of what a 5-star movie is, and rarely does everyone agree. That’s what makes Letterboxd such a fun social media platform. You don’t need to write for the Chicago Sun Times or the Chicago Tribune to get your movie opinions out there. You don’t need to know a darn thing about form, cinematography, film history, or anything else. If you don’t think like that, I’m sure there’s a place for you at Substack.
The reason why Letterboxd users are constantly angry about the way other people use the site is that it is what we have been conditioned to do. What you do on social media will be scrutinized no matter what and how inconsequential it is. It doesn’t matter if you’re my friend Ella, who rates literally every movie she watches with five stars no matter how she actually feels about it; or if you’re my friend Carly, who meticulously shapes her Letterboxd curve so that it peaks at three stars and fizzles out by ½ and five stars. Or even me, who pays no mind to my curve. Someone will be angry at you for how you rate art, no matter what. As long as we overanalyze the “right” and “wrong” way to talk about art, we will never be free. Aren’t we tired of judging people all the time for minor transgressions that have no real-world consequences? Can’t we move on from high school, please?
