About FirstCinema

Keeping a record

Every film you rate goes into your diary with the date you watched it, so your profile becomes a record of a year rather than a pile of opinions. Rating and reviewing are separate on purpose: four stars takes a click, and a paragraph takes an evening, so you are never made to do the second to get credit for the first.

How recommendations work

They are built from your own ratings, the lists you keep, and members whose taste lines up with yours, never from what is trending or what someone paid to place. The more you rate, the sharper they get. Discover asks five questions about what you are in the mood for tonight and draws one film from your own history; Roulette skips the questions and picks.

What is in the catalogue

We carry films with a real audience behind them rather than everything ever released, which keeps search usable and keeps the recommender from drowning in titles nobody has seen. That means shorts, festival titles and some older releases are missing. If one you want is not here, there is a request form at the bottom of the films page, and we read every request.

Where the film data comes from

Titles, posters, backdrops, cast and release dates come from The Movie Database. Rating and vote-count figures attributed to IMDb come from IMDb's published datasets. Both are read-only sources, and we send them nothing about you.

What we don't do

• No paid placement. Nothing in the catalogue, in search, or in your recommendations is there because someone paid for it. The site carries ads, they are marked as ads, and they buy space on the page and nothing else.
• No analytics of our own, and no session recording. The ad network sets an identifier, which is what the consent prompt asks you about, and declining it changes which ads you see rather than how many.
• We don't host or stream films, and we don't link to copies of them.
• Your reviews and lists stay yours, and leave with you when you go.