How to rank your favorite movies

Do not score your films. Sort them. Split everything you have seen into three rough piles, then settle each film's place with a few head-to-head questions against films already in its pile. Five or six questions per film is enough to place it in a list of hundreds, and every question is one you can answer without thinking hard.

Step one: three piles, decided by gut

Go through your watched films and drop each one into loved it, it was fine, or did not like it. Do not overthink it. A three-way call is fast because it is the shape of what you actually remember about a film, and a fourth pile turns a decision into a menu.

This step does most of the work for free. It cuts the field into thirds before you compare anything, and it means you never have to ask whether a film you loved beats a film you sat through, which is not a real question.

Start with the loved-it pile. It is the one you care about ordering, and it is where the method pays off fastest.

Step two: place each film with head-to-head questions

Take the pile you want ordered. If it is empty, the first film goes in and you are done. For every film after that, ask one question at a time and let each answer throw away half the remaining possibilities.

• Compare the new film against the one sitting in the middle of the pile. The question is always the same: which of these two did I like more?
• If the new film wins, it belongs somewhere in the top half. Ignore the bottom half completely. If it loses, ignore the top half.
• Compare it against the middle of whatever half survived. Repeat. Each answer halves the range again.
• Stop when one position is left, or when you have asked five or six questions and the remaining window is small enough that you no longer care. Drop it in the middle of that window.

This is binary insertion, and the arithmetic is friendly: a list of 16 needs about four questions, a list of 100 needs about seven, a list of 1,000 needs about ten. The work grows with the logarithm of the list, not with the list, which is why it stays pleasant long after a hand-ordered list would have collapsed.

Two rules keep the answers honest. Compare against films from the same pile, so you are always choosing between two things you feel similarly about. And ask about liking rather than about quality: "which did I like more" is a question your gut answers, while "which is the better film" invites you to perform.

Step three: allow ties and skips, and mean them

Some pairs are genuinely level. Call them a tie, put the new film next to its partner, and move on. Some pairs are unanswerable rather than close, like a horror film against a documentary. Skip that one and ask about a different film in the pile instead.

The thing to avoid is using a tie as an escape hatch. If you tie everything, the list stops meaning anything, and you will be able to tell within a week.

Step four: let the order produce the numbers

You may not need numbers at all. The order is the answer, and a ranked list is more useful than a column of scores because it is already sorted.

If you do want a score, derive it from position instead of inventing it. Give each pile a slice of the 0 to 10 scale and spread the pile across its slice, so the top of your loved-it pile lands near 10 and the bottom of it lands at the pile's floor rather than in the middle of the scale. One decimal is as far as this can honestly go. Two decimals are decoration.

Do the same thing every time and the numbers stay comparable, because they are all reports on the same list.

Step five: revisit, because taste moves

A ranking is a snapshot of your taste, and taste changes. Rewatch something and find it has grown or shrunk, and just re-place it: pull it out and run the same handful of questions again. Every few months, ask a few questions about films near each other in the middle of the list, where placements are always least certain. The list gets truer without ever needing a rebuild.

Spreadsheet or app?

A spreadsheet works, and plenty of people genuinely do this. One sheet per pile, one row per film, insert rows as you place them. The method is the valuable part and it does not belong to anyone.

What a spreadsheet cannot do is remember. It does not know which comparisons you have already answered, so it cannot avoid asking again, and it cannot use an old answer to place a new film. It will not tell you that your placement of a film near the middle is shakier than your placement of your number one. And it will not keep itself current when you watch something on a Wednesday night.

Where Reelist fits

Reelist is this exact method with the bookkeeping done for you. One tap puts a film in a band, at most ten comparisons place it, ties and skips are first-class answers, and the score falls out of the position with one decimal. It keeps every answer you have ever given, so the list stays current as you watch, and you can rank every movie you've watched rather than only the ones you thought to write down.

The social half is the part a spreadsheet cannot reach at all: follow friends, see how closely your taste matches theirs, and get a predicted score for films you have not seen yet, built from the rankings of people who agree with you. Films only, no ads, no streaks, no leaderboards. Reelist ranks films, never people.