About Matinee
Tell Matinee what you're in the mood for and it picks tonight's film from the library.
Why it exists
It started with a problem I kept running into. I'd sit down with no idea what I was in the mood for. Eventually I'd settle on something, say a thriller, and sort the library by genre. Then I'd scroll past films I felt didn't truly belong, and the ones I actually wanted got lost in the noise.
So I built a small recommender, just for me. Along the way I found the MovieLens tag genome and DoesTheDogDie, and each one pulled the project further. It grew into what you're using now: a way to land on the film you actually feel like watching tonight.
It won't always get it right. Where a film belongs is a judgment call, and yours may differ from mine. If you think I've put something in the wrong place, you can tell me where it fits best by choosing "Something wrong with this pick?". Every note reaches whoever runs Matinee, and when they agree, the film moves for everyone.
How it knows what a film feels like
Genre labels are blunt. The tag genome is the opposite. It comes from MovieLens, a research project at the University of Minnesota, and it scores thousands of films against more than a thousand tags like atmospheric, dark humor, slow paced and twist ending, learned from the tags and ratings of MovieLens users. Matinee leans on it to judge how much gore a horror film carries.
It's a genuinely fascinating piece of work, and worth a look.
Visit MovieLens · The tag genome dataset
Harper and Konstan (2015), The MovieLens Datasets: History and Context. Vig, Sen and Riedl (2012), The Tag Genome: Encoding Community Knowledge to Support Novel Interaction.
How it steers around things
DoesTheDogDie is a site where people vote on what's in a film, so you can know before you watch. Its name is its most famous question, but it covers hundreds of topics, from spiders to needles. It's a lovely bit of community work, and worth a visit.
When you ask Matinee to steer around something, it checks each pick against those votes before showing it to you. It's best effort: a film nobody has voted on can't be checked, and Matinee tells you when that happens.
Posters and film data
On this demo, the posters come from my own film library.
This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
Good company
Matinee only picks the film. Two projects I've relied on for years take care of the rest of the evening, and both are worth your time.
Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server: your own films, kept on your own computer, ready on the screens around the house.
Seerr is where a film you don't have yet becomes one you can ask for. Matinee can open any pick there, and in my house that's the very next step after a pick we don't own. It's free and open source too, from the team behind Overseerr and Jellyseerr.
Jellyfin, Plex, Seerr, TMDB, DoesTheDogDie and MovieLens are shown to say Matinee works with them; none of them endorses it. Plex and the Plex logo are trademarks of Plex and used under a license. The Jellyfin logo is by the Jellyfin contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Seerr logo is from the Seerr project, under the MIT licence.
The posters on this site belong to their studios and are shown to illustrate the software. If one is yours, open an issue on the site's repository and it comes down.