This site was introduced to me several months ago and it's absolutely addictive. It's called Criticker and it helps you choose movies to watch based on recommendations by other movie lovers. Here's how it works. You work through the list of movies in their database and rank each movie on a scale of 1 to 100. Then (for example), their program looks at the 727 movies I've ranked so far--like I said, addictive--and the 72 my brother Jeff has ranked, and determines that there are 45 that we've both seen. Of course, it does this for me against thousands of other users. Eventually, it tells you what users tastes most closely match your own, and then you can use recommendations of films they've seen to tell you what you might like that's out there. Obviously, the more films that you and everyone else rate, the more accurate the system will become (see the logic here).

I can't justify ranking anything less than a 20. So I've taken my 727 movies and each number between 20 and 100 gets about nine movies slotted there. My nine favorites are (in alphabetical order): Amadeus, Casablanca, The Empire Strikes Back, Field of Dreams, The Godfather, Raiders of the Lost Arc, Rocky, Star Wars, and the original Superman. The bottom nine--and it'd be tough to crack this dreadful group--are Captain EO, A Clockwork Orange, Exorcist II, Halloween III, Last Tango In Paris, Nell, Nurse Betty, Tapeheads, and Vulgar. Yeah, there are a couple of alleged classics in there, but they both sucked.