Have you ever had trouble picking a good movie to watch on Netflix? Ever found that the streaming service’s native rating system can be arbitrary and misleading? Do you wish that you could easily access critic reviews for the films in your library? Cinesift has got you sorted.
Cinesift is a pretty simple online tool, which only makes it more surprising that no one has come up with a similar service before. Tick the Netflix box (sadly no options for Australian services Stan and Presto, though it can search the Amazon Prime library), pick your genre and region and get a list of all the films available to you, sorted by their ranking on various review sites.
Cinesift takes data from as number of sources, including both Rotten Tomatoes‘ Tomatometer and audience score, IMDB rating, Letterboxd rating, and Metacritic‘s Metascore. It then puts them all together, averaging all the scores for a combined rating. As an example, The Godfather is the top rated film in Netflix’s Australian library. You can also narrow the search in a surprising number of ways, such as only seeing films with over a certain number of critic reviews, or specifying the acceptable Metascore (or any of the individual site’s ratings) range for films to show up in a search.
The library seems to be fairly accurate, though I have encountered one film on Cinesift that wasn’t included in the Netflix AU library — the 2011 horror film The Road, which may have been mixed up with the 2009 film of the same name, which is on Netflix Australia.
Unfortunately Cinesift doesn’t give you a direct link to the films on Netflix, though it does allow you to sign up and add things to a watchlist on their site — a bit of a baffling feature when Netflix already has its own perfectly good list. Still, if you have a hard time deciding to watch and are sick of having to constantly cross reference IMBD with your Netflix library, then Cinesift will prove itself to be a useful little tool.