About

Cinetrii is a service that aims to connect movies and TV shows based on influence, inferred through the writings of film critics. It can be used to better understand the context of a work, what other works may have inspired it or vice-versa. Cinetrii can be used as a movie recommendation engine, one which doesn’t rely on viewing patterns but similar themes and ideas. Cinetrii launched in 2017 and has been featured in a few online magazines like Gizmodo and Lifehacker. HuffPost called it ‘the best movie recommendation web app’ they’ve come across.

Why

Understanding the context of a movie is not necessary to enjoy it, but for a certain kind of (curious) moviegoer it enriches the experience. Given that the art form is well over a century old at this point it is seldom that a movie is made without precedent in terms of themes, plot beats or visual ideas. Filmmakers are inspired by what came before, some wear their influences on their sleeve and some are more subtle. Film critics in turn are suited to infer these connections as they are well versed in film and making linkages is part of the modern film critic grammar.

How

Cinetrii finds occurrences where a film critic makes a connection between two works. These are then aggregated and classified based on connection type, such as similar theme, visuals or characters. The most common connections in text however are those of intersecting cast or crew - like referring to the director’s previous movie. These are not as interesting, so they are weighted down to not saturate the results.

Cinetrii relies on written reviews. Cinetrii therefore indexes and collects reviews continuously from hundreds of online, non-paywalled publications using its own crawler. The reviews used are linked back to on the results of any given movie or film query.

History

Cinetrii has gone through a visual overhaul. The original website launched in 2017 featured results in an interactive node graph - a tree, hence the ‘trii’ in Cinetrii. The tree was only suitable for desktop, so later a stripped down, scrolling mobile view was added. For the 2026 redesign of Cinetrii.com the tree was retired, as web traffic was dominated by mobile users.