My Successful Methods for Finding Movies I'll Love
I commend them to you, and these work much better than the subscribe-and-find method heavily advertised to you
News came yesterday that Netflix once again is raising its prices.
I think this must continue for them for a good long while. Their business model was to spend-and-suck — spend a lot of money on proprietary content, and then suck as many users in as possible.
At that point, they would dominate their market, like Amazon, the model they were imitating. Then they could raise prices ad infinitum because of “loyalty,” one of the great principles of persuasion so often used to produce the automatic response in consumers that giant businesses want.
Well, do you really want to spend more and more money on Netflix? I don’t.
Not only did they forsake their business’ primary aspect — a subscription library of all movies on media ever made — their original content overall, pardon me, really does suck.
I know this well. I had been reviewing their new content for years, until recently when I stopped. Because everything they churned out was the equivalent of old TV-movies or straight-to-video content. None of it was about the art of film; instead, it was clearly cheaply and quickly made, just to make a buck, or in their case, billions of bucks.
I’ve spent years and years pondering the following puzzle because all I ever want to do is watch great movies: “how do I maximize my viewing experience by never watching a bad movie ever?”
Because life is short, wouldn’t it be great is if all we watched were great movies?
This is impossible, yet we can strive for it. The question is how?
I’ve found three methods that work well, delivering a 33-50% success rate for me.
That might sound low, and you might respond in this way: “you mean if I use these methods, I will only find one good movie for every three I watch?”
Yes, and that is pretty high! Because nobody, no one and certainly no algorithm, can deliver better than that for an extremely complex organism/spiritual being that is always changing and developing. That’s you!
I suggest trying these and seeing if you can at least increase the number of great movies you will see. If they don’t work, your money will be returned to you. Of course, trying any of these might be cheaper than a subscription to Netflix, if you are reading this in 2025!
Method #1 — Follow the Director
This one might work best, by which I mean the success rate is going to be the highest of all the methods, though it’s going to provide fewer choices overall.
The idea is simple: if you like/love a work by a director, keep going with that director. Watch all of his/her movies.
The premise here is that a director is like an author of books – cue the “auteur theory” of film. A director is a great artist whose visionary gifts transfer somehow into all of their works of art.
Recently on my Discord channel, several people were talking about watching through the films of David Cronenberg (“Videodrome”) and Peter Weir (“The Truman Show”). They were having, it seems to me, a high success rate, too. Loving one Weir film meant that if you moved to three or four others, you will have a high probability of at least liking those.
This method is particularly awesome if you hit upon a director who made dozens of films, e.g., Bergman, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Fassbender. Then you can do something I think is really fun: watch through that director’s films chronologically. When you do that, you’ll see the development of that director, and ALWAYS you will find that director quoting and reflecting on their earlier works in their later works.
For me, that’s always a delight.
Method #2 — Find a movie critic or three, and go through their highest recommendations
This one is like Method #1 above: you are following the unique perspective of a discerning someone, or small group of someones, who has vast experience with films.
Often these critics have lists, or books about their 100 or 1000 favorite films. That makes your life incredibly easy – but first you have to find the critic or three whose unique vision inspires you.
As you know, critics are a dime a dozen on the Internet. Most of them hob-nob in elite circles in American coastal cities or European cities, which means their particular visions all might be limited in some way. It’s a challenge to initially find the critics who help you out the most.
I used to go through Roger Ebert’s Four-Star reviews. Even better is his Great-Movie-Essay series, which had a higher rate of return for me.
This method, I’ve found, is far better than working through an organizational or aggregate list. By that I mean something like the AFI Top-100 American film list, or the BFI Sight-and-Sound poll, or the IMDB top-250 list.
I find these lists water down the idiosyncratic qualities that make an individual critic’s favorites list so interesting. And, with one critic, you can filter their perspective – you can know, by reading carefully, when you think they are wrong even when they think they are right.
This you just cannot do with big aggregate lists; it’s one of their major disadvantages.
Method #3 — Pick a decade, write down all of the Oscar Best-Picture nominees and various critics’ “Years’s Best Movies” choices, and filter through those
This method I have just stumbled upon. Of anything, I’m happiest of all with this one.
That’s probably because of personal preference: I love the exploration-and-discovery experience of finding new great films to me, combined with cultural analysis of what those films are saying to/about their own times.
This method lets me think about, for example, what was culturally relevant in the early 1980s and what gems we’ve missed or lost through time.
To continue using the early 1980s as an example, there are dozens of movies that were on Siskel-and-Ebert’s year-end best-of lists, or that were Oscar-nominated, or that won film-festival prizes, that are almost completely forgotten. And to me, a good percentage of them are very good or even great.
To bring this back to Netflix, some of this is their fault. If most of their content is from 2015-2023, by their extremely limited library alone, they are erasing most of film history. Thankfully, you can still find nearly all of the forgotten films somehow – through some streaming service somewhere, or on disc via interlibrary loan.
Anyway, this method will lead to back to Method #1. By using Method #3, you will find directors you love and then you can follow through on their other works.
For myself, I realize now I should’ve done this with Sidney Lumet, who I knew from a half-dozen great films (e.g., 12 Angry Men; Network), but whose more obscure or less-regarded works I have ignored until now.
I can guarantee, with reasonably high probability – again, 33-50% -- that I will find other Lumet works that I will love.
And in any time, including times where movies seem to be languishing and most of them are formulaic drivel, you realize that film history itself is full of so many great works of art that you will need more than one lifetime to experience them all fully.
There are now, therefore, more good movies than opportunities in one lifetime to watch them.
I’m using method #2 with the 1001 Movies book. One thing I like about this is that it includes movies which, though not themselves great films, represent a something significant that was happening at the time. For instance, I saw a fun Rudolph Valentino film called “The Eagle” (1925). It was somewhat mediocre. But it was really cool to immediately see why that actor was legendary for his good looks (to the point where he even shows up in the first few lines 80s song “Manic Monday” by the Bangles). And last week I watched “Babes in Arms” (1939). Again, nothing like a Great Film, but charming in its own way, and a good example of the Judy Garland / Mickey Rooney team that was apparently very popular in a string of movies at the time. Though Garland was immortalized only a few months earlier in “The Wizard of Oz”, I had had no idea what else she was doing or that she had an onscreen partnership with Rooney.