The end of every year brings an onslaught of lists ranking movies of all kinds, and while we here at FSR like to keep our participation to a minimum one of our new favorites is the Letterboxd 2013 Year in Review. If you’re not already familiar, the site allows members to track, rate, and review movies they have seen, want to see, or have chosen to never see for as long as they live.
I use it to track movies through the year including ones I’ve seen at film festivals, but you can find lists as diverse as Top 15 Manliest Movies, Nicolas Cage Appreciations, and Murderous Midgets & Venomous Vents. Yeah, I don’t know what that last one’s about either.
Adding to the site’s functionality is a sleek design that truly shines with their Year in Review posting. Full screen images are accompanied by detailed stats informed by a user base that currently sits at 86,000 strong. 2013 saw the 18 millionth film logged since the site’s inception, and this year was their busiest yet resulting in outcomes both expected and surprising. Who would have guessed Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained would be Letterboxd’s most actively discussed film during 2013?
As seen in the header above the year’s highest rated film among users was Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave with the remaining top ten including Her, Short Term 12, Gravity, and others. France’s Blue Is the Warmest Color took the #1 spot for highest rated foreign language film, and while the rest of the top ten includes some great movies (Drug War, The Past, A Hijacking) it somehow missed the actual best foreign language film of the year…
Other categories covered in this retrospective include Highest Rated Science Fiction (Gravity, sorry Chris), Horror (Stoker), and action (Captain Phillips). There are also more stats, always more stats, revealing that over eleven million films were marked as watched in 2013 accounting for over three million hours spent watching them. And lest you think the site is only used for tracking newer films know that only 23.8% of the movies were 2013 releases.
Check out the full Letterboxd 2013 Year in Review, and if you’re not already a member get on that now so you can be a part of next year’s stats!
