Now Showing

Ever since I was a kid, I've hunted for new films, new music and new books that I might like.

I take different approaches - browsing in stores, using recommendation engines, asking friends, asking ChatGPT...

For films, one obvious approach is to browse streaming services. But this has always been deeply unsatisfactory. Too much choice means you start watching something and then get FOMO. Poorly tuned recommendation engines mean that the stuff that is surfaced often isn't stuff I like.

So I thought - it wouldn't take very long to periodically scan through every new release on the streaming services I watch, and pick the interesting looking films. I looked online but nothing really let me do that. There are magazines that publish barren lists with no details. The streaming services each have their own What's New page, but you have to go to open a tab for every film. And there are Just Watch and Rotten Tomatoes but they're not comprehensive and again you're clicking five thousand times.

On January 1, 2024, Netflix and HBO released eighty-four new films on streaming. What if you just got one, big scannable list, where each film was accompanied by rich detail - what it's about, who's in it, who directed it, a still, a trailer, reviews? In this format, you can blast through all of them in like five minutes, pull out some promising ones and start watching.

So - that's Now Showing. Give it a try at https://nowshowing.substack.com/about