Letterboxd is the best film diary ever built. It is also the wrong tool for answering the question you ask every Friday evening: what should I actually watch tonight? That question requires something Letterboxd deliberately doesn't provide — a personalized recommender that has read your entire taste history and returned a ranked programme built around it. That's what a great Letterboxd companion does.
What a companion should add — and what it shouldn't break
A companion doesn't try to replace what Letterboxd already does well: keeping a diary, connecting you with other cinephiles, hosting reviews, and maintaining the most complete film social graph on the internet. A good companion leaves all of that intact and fills the gaps Letterboxd chose to leave open.
Those gaps are deliberate. Letterboxd's discovery features are social and film-adjacent — you see what friends are watching, what's trending, and similar titles on each film's page. What it doesn't do is look at the full arc of your watch history and generate tonight's programme from your taste. The companion has to.
How Intertitle reads your taste — not just your list
The right measure of a companion isn't how many of your films it mirrors back at you. Any app can list your Letterboxd diary. The measure is whether it can find the signal in your ratings: the directors you keep returning to, the decades you're drawn to, the tonal register you consistently rate highest, and the films you abandoned or rated poorly. That pattern is your taste profile.
Intertitle builds that profile from your Letterboxd export — a ZIP you can download from Letterboxd Settings → Import & Export → Export Your Data in about thirty seconds. Intertitle converts your diary and ratings into a taste profile and scores unwatched films against it, returning a short ranked programme for tonight. No quiz, no genre picker, no trending list. Just your history, turned into picks.
Once the import is done, you can connect your Letterboxd handle so Intertitle keeps the profile current automatically. A background sync pulls in new diary entries every six hours, so every film you log in Letterboxd makes the next programme sharper — without re-exporting.
The taste map: seeing your pattern, not just your pile
A flat list of watched films doesn't tell you what you actually liked or why. Intertitle's taste map turns your ratings into a visual representation of your preferences across directors, genres, decades, and tonal registers — so you can see the shape of your taste, not just scroll through it. That map also drives recommendations: the films Intertitle surfaces are scored against the pattern the map reveals.
Reely: the journal layer a diary app doesn't give you
Letterboxd gives you a text box to write a review. What it doesn't give you is a space to work out what you actually thought before you commit a rating. That's where Reely, Intertitle's film-journal layer, fits. After watching, you can talk a film through with Reely in a conversational exchange, and from that conversation Reely can draft a diary entry and suggest a rating to take back to Letterboxd. The diary stays there; the thinking happens here. For more on the value of keeping that record, see why a film diary matters.
Stats apps vs. the real companion
Most apps that work with Letterboxd are stats dashboards — they take your watch history and describe it back: films per director, decades distribution, average rating. That's interesting, but it describes the past rather than shaping the next watch. Intertitle does both: the taste map gives you the stat view, and the recommender turns that same pattern into a ranked shortlist for tonight.
The companion loop
Import your Letterboxd history once, connect your handle for ongoing sync, open Intertitle when you have a free evening, and see tonight's ranked programme. Watch something, log it — in Intertitle or in Letterboxd — and that log sharpens the next round. The diary and social layer stay on Letterboxd. The taste engine and the thinking layer live here.
That's what the best Letterboxd companion does: it doesn't try to be Letterboxd, and it doesn't replace the part of it you already rely on. It does the thing Letterboxd deliberately left for someone else to build.