Frequently Asked Questions

CineBrats is a curated guide to explore the canon of film history alongside a way to see how much of it you've actually consumed.

It organizes cinema into Collections — bounded, opinionated sets of films drawn from the Movements, Auteurs, and all-time Lists that define the medium. As you log the films you've seen, your coverage of that canon resolves into a single number: your Cinephilia Score. You can then set goals: choose the Collections you want to complete, and work toward them.

CineBrats is built for people who take film seriously — who want to work through the whole canon, not just the highlights, and want a map to get there. It isn't a social feed or a watch diary; other services (like Letterboxd) already do that well. It's a narrower, more deliberate thing.

Across CineBrats, three terms organize everything, from broadest to most specific:

• A Lens is our top level: the broadest way films are organized. There are currently three — Movements, Auteurs, and Lists — and each Lens contains many Collections.
• A Collection sits in the middle: it belongs to exactly one Lens and gathers many Films around a single, specific subject. A Collection is the level you complete by logging all of its films. Examples: French New Wave, Mumblecore, Elevated Horror.
• A Film is the bottom level: a single movie. A Film belongs to one or many Collections and can sit in Collections across different Lenses. The number of Collections a Film belongs to is its centrality.

Your Cinephilia Score estimates how much of film history's canon you've seen — and it's built to reward importance, not just volume. Two things move it: the films you log and the Collections you complete.

What a film is worth

Every film you log (that's in the CineBrats catalog) earns a small base amount just for being seen. On top of that, a film earns more the more often it shows up in the parts of the catalog that signal importance: a bit more for each Movement it belongs to, and more still for each List it lands on. If a film sits on our one definitive “spine” list (Greatest Films of All Time), it gets an extra premium on top.

Here’s the formula we use to determine how many points any given film is worth:

To note:

• Belonging to an Auteur Collection earns a film no extra points by itself. We believe that an important director making a film doesn't automatically make the film itself important.
• Appearing on more Lists helps a film’s score, but with diminishing returns. A film on four Lists is worth more than one on a single List, but not four times as much.

Finishing counts

You're rewarded for completing a Collection. Bigger Collections are worth more to finish, and more prestigious ones count for more.

Worked examples

Here's how a few real films in the catalog actually score, at the current point weights (as of July 25, 2026):

• Chinatown (1974) is in the New Hollywood Movement Collection, on the Greatest Films of All Time spine List, and in the Roman Polanski Auteur Collection. It collects the base, a Movement, a List, and the spine premium — while the Auteur membership adds nothing — for a total of 3.25 points.

• Shoah (1985) sits on two lists — the spine and Greatest Documentaries. The two memberships don't simply add up; the square root tempers them, so it lands at 3.21 points.

• Snowpiercer (2013) appears only in the Bong Joon-ho Auteur Collection. It earns just the base: 1.00 points.

How high can it go?

Right now, the highest possible Cinephilia Score is 1,441.72 — every film's value across all 624 films currently spread over CineBrats' 76 Collections, plus every completion bonus, which is exactly what you'd earn by seeing all of them. That ceiling isn't fixed. Because CineBrats keeps adding Collections — and every new Collection brings new films and can raise the value of films already in the catalog — the maximum only ever climbs.

How a score is shown

Everywhere it appears, a Cinephilia Score is written in one consistent form:

Reading it left to right:

• The score is your current Cinephilia Score. It can never fall when CineBrats adds Collections — only hold or climb. Editorial additions add memberships: a film you've already logged might join a new Collection (raising its value), or the new Collection might be one you've already completed (handing you its bonus).
• The percentage is how much of the current maximum your score represents. Unlike the score itself, it can move in either direction over time: as new Collections push the maximum higher, your share of it shifts.

The editors at CineBrats decide which Collections to add — which Movements, Auteurs, and Lists are worth building. That's where our opinion ends. Everything inside a Collection — above all, which films comprise it — is drawn from credible, leading film critics and editorial sources, not from us.

To weigh those sources, we use AI. Several frontier AI platforms — not one — systematically search across the best available criticism, weigh the differing judgments against one another, and work toward a final selection. Relying on multiple independent models rather than a single one is deliberate: it reduces the influence of any one system's bias.

Roughly monthly we add one new List, Movement, and Auteur Collection — along with all of the new Collection's films. We don’t currently anticipate adding any new Lenses.

CineBrats collects as little as it can, and never sells your data.

What we collect

• Account basics. When you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your name and email address from them. We never see or store a password — sign-in is handled entirely by Google or Apple.
• Your activity on the site. The films you log, the Collections you set as goals, and your profile details.
• Basic technical data. Your IP address and browser type, which our host and CDN process automatically to serve pages and keep the site secure.
• Anonymous analytics. We use Umami, a privacy-first, cookieless analytics tool, to count page views and see which features get used. It doesn't track you across other sites and doesn't build an advertising profile.

How we use the data we collect about you

Only to run the site: to sign you in, save your film logs and Cinephilia Score, show your profile, and understand in aggregate what's working. No advertising, no data brokering.

Who it's shared with

We don't sell or rent your data. It's handled by the services that make CineBrats run — Google and Apple (sign-in), our hosting and CDN providers (delivery and security), and Umami (analytics). We also use Anthropic’s agentic coding tools to build and maintain our site, and Anthropic often accesses our database directly during this process.

Cookies

We use a single, strictly-necessary cookie to keep you signed in. We don't use advertising or tracking cookies — which is why you won't see a cookie-consent banner.

Your rights

Contact us at [email protected] to: ask what we hold about you; correct it; or delete your account and data at any time. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws like the GDPR or CCPA — we'll honor them.

Children

CineBrats isn't directed at children under 13 (or under 16 in the EU and UK), and we don't knowingly collect their data.

Last updated: July 2026.

You're always free to leave.

To delete your account and everything tied to it — your film logs, goals, profile, and score — email [email protected] from the address you signed up with, and we'll remove it.

Deleting your account erases your personal data from the CineBrats production database (though we can’t guarantee the data will be deleted from our secure backups). Anonymous, aggregate analytics that can't be traced back to you may also remain.

The short version: use CineBrats in good faith, and understand that it's offered as-is by a small, independent project.

• It's free, and provided "as is." We work hard to keep the canon accurate and the site running, but we can't guarantee it will always be available, error-free, or complete. Film data comes from third parties and may contain mistakes.
• Use it fairly. Don't try to break, overload, scrape, or abuse the site, and don't upload anything unlawful or infringing where the site lets you add content.
• Your account is yours to keep in order. You're responsible for what happens under your sign-in. We may suspend or remove accounts that abuse the service. If you log that you’ve seen a film, be honest — we consider a “seen” film as one you’ve watched 100% of.
• The site and these terms can change. CineBrats evolves and these terms along with them.
• Limitation of liability. To the fullest extent the law allows, CineBrats and its makers aren't liable for any loss arising from your use of the site.

CineBrats is a guide to film history. It doesn't own the films it maps, and it doesn't claim to.

• The films, posters, and images belong to their respective studios, distributors, and rights holders. Poster images and film data are provided by TMDB; we display them under TMDB's terms, and we are not endorsed by or affiliated with TMDB.
• Trademarks and names — studios, publications, and other services we reference are the property of their owners. We name them only to identify and discuss the films. CineBrats is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any studio, publication, streaming service, or rights holder.
• Our Collections are informed by respected lists and critics, never copied from them.

Are you a rights holder with a concern? If you believe something on CineBrats infringes your copyright, contact us at [email protected]. We take these issues seriously and will review — and, where appropriate, remove the material — promptly.

Right now, CineBrats has zero social or community features. In a world where people start using the site, we’d love to build features that establish more of a CineBrats community, including ways to:

• See a leaderboard and other users’ activity — including a follow feature for other users.
• Vote on which new Lists, Movements, and Auteurs should be added to the site.
• Start structured campaigns to modify an existing Collection. For example, if you think the French New Wave Collection is missing a key film, you could start a formal campaign to modify it — if your campaign received enough votes, the change would be implemented.

We’d also love to create an iOS app — which we don’t think will be especially difficult.

If you have an idea on ways to improve the site, let us know: [email protected].

Email us at [email protected].

CineBrats was created by Jonathan Powers. Hi, that's me. 👋

I first had the idea back in 2010, after watching the excellent documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. What struck me was that there was a whole world of films most people had never heard of, and a rich subculture built around them. But every time I tried to explore film history and level up my own literacy, I felt like I was stumbling around in the dark — unsure what to watch, or worse, lacking the context to make sense of an older or obscure film once I had.

Fifteen years later, I finally built this site. It's entirely a passion project, and I have no idea whether it will attract a single other regular user. If it doesn’t, that wouldn't be ideal, but I think it'll still have been worth the effort.