The reason you scroll for twenty minutes and give up isn't lack of options — it's too many, ranked by what's trending instead of what you like. The fix is to choose from your own taste: Intertitle reads your Letterboxd history and recommends tonight's film from your actual taste — not the algorithm's guess.
The Decision-Paralysis Problem
Most streaming interfaces are optimized to keep you browsing, not to help you pick. The trending row surfaces what's popular, not what you'll finish. The "because you watched" row is a one-hop inference based on genre tags and surface-level metadata — it doesn't know you find most horror slow-burn but thought Hereditary was overlong, or that you rate Italian neorealism consistently high but rarely want it on a weeknight.
The result is a familiar loop: scroll, consider, hesitate, scroll again. Twenty minutes later you've watched nothing and watched everything available, simultaneously.
Three Ways to Pick Tonight's Film
1. By mood
You know roughly what you're in the mood for — something light, something slow, something that will challenge you. You search the genre filter. The problem is genre is a blunt instrument. "Drama" covers everything from Yi Yi to The Notebook. "Thriller" includes Mulholland Drive and Speed. Filtering by mood narrows the pool but doesn't rank it by what you specifically tend to like within that mood. You still have to vet two hundred results against your own judgment in real time.
2. By a trusted list
Critics' lists, Letterboxd community lists, canonical rankings — these are high-signal when they happen to match your taste. The problem is they match your taste partially, not personally. A list of the hundred best films of the 1990s will overlap with your actual preferences substantially, but not personally. The other thirty percent will be films the list-maker values for reasons that don't extend to you: formal experimentation you find cold, subject matter you're not drawn to, a directorial sensibility you've logged and rated and quietly moved on from. Picking from a trusted list is a better starting point than the algorithm, but it still leaves the final vetting to you.
3. By your taste profile
The third approach uses what you've already demonstrated about your preferences over time. If you've been logging on Letterboxd for two years — even inconsistently — you have a viewing record that contains real signal: which directors you return to, which films you've rated highest, the shape of what you respond to across genres and decades.
This is the approach that reliably produces picks you'll actually watch and finish. Instead of an algorithm guessing what's trending for your demographic, or a list that approximates your taste at the genre level, you get a recommendation drawn directly from the film history you've built. The evidence base is your own.
How It Works: Import Letterboxd, Get Tonight's Programme
Intertitle imports your Letterboxd export — a ZIP or individual CSVs containing your diary, ratings, reviews, watched history, and watchlist. It doesn't start from scratch or ask you to fill out a questionnaire about your favorite decade or whether you prefer character studies to plot-driven films. It starts from evidence.
Once your taste profile is built, there are two ways to land on tonight's pick. Open the Tonight screen for a short, taste-ranked programme — a handful of films ranked from your taste, your strongest match headlined. Or open Reely, Intertitle's conversational companion, and just ask.
The walkthrough is short:
- Import your Letterboxd export — upload the ZIP or individual CSVs, a one-time setup. (No Letterboxd? Rate a handful of films in-app instead.)
- Open the Tonight screen for your taste-ranked programme, led by your best match.
- Or skip straight to Reely and ask "What should I watch tonight?" in plain language.
A short, taste-ranked programme is deliberate. The point is to end the scroll loop — a handful of films ranked from your taste, not an endless feed ordered by popularity.
The fastest path: just ask Reely
The quickest way to decide is to skip the screens and ask. Open Reely and type "What should I watch tonight?" — it reads your taste profile and watch history and comes back with a specific recommendation, not a wall of options. From there you can keep talking: narrow by mood, ask for something shorter, or get the case for why it picked what it did. For a lot of nights, that single question is the whole decision.
A Note on Letterboxd vs. Intertitle
Intertitle is built around your Letterboxd diary, which means it works alongside Letterboxd rather than replacing it. Letterboxd is where you log, discover via community lists, follow critics, and see what friends are watching. Intertitle is what you reach for when you've already decided you want to watch something tonight and need tonight's programme ranked from your own taste.
If you're weighing which features each product handles better, there's a direct comparison at Intertitle vs Letterboxd.