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What To Watch
Recommendation engines, streaming locators and lists with actual taste. Built for the forty minutes usually lost to a menu.
14 sites
Hand-picked, highly rated films that were never blockbusters, filterable by mood and by where you can currently stream them.
- 2 min
Scores films for you by finding users whose past ratings track yours, then weighting their opinions. Recommendation with the maths shown.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Crowdsourced content warnings covering a hundred-odd specific triggers, so you can check beforehand rather than find out during.
- <1 min
The canonical crowd-ranked list of 250 films, weighted to resist review bombing. A reliable way to spot the gap in your viewing.
- 2 min
Tells you which streaming service in your country actually has the film, and whether it is included or a rental.
- <1 min
Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.
- 1 hr+
Weighted average of professional reviews on a 0-100 scale, with the user score shown separately when the two disagree loudly.
- 2 min
Filters every streaming catalogue at once by genre, rating and service, then hands you exactly one thing to watch.
- 2 min
The percentage that launched a thousand arguments — the share of critics who were positive, which is not an average score.
- <1 min
Tells you the best three minutes to leave for the toilet during any film, and summarises exactly what you missed. Absurd, and it works.
- <1 min
Name something you liked and it returns things with the same texture, spanning films, books, music and games at once.
- 2 min
Community-maintained film and television database with an open API, which is why half the apps you use are quietly built on it.
- 10 min
Aggregates hundreds of critics' polls into a ranked thousand greatest films. Deeply unfashionable design, entirely unmatched rigour.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Tracks what you have watched across every service and tells you which episode is next in the series you abandoned in March.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
What To Watch: questions
How many sites are in What To Watch?
14 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
13 of the 14 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
12 of 14 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 14 are safe for work and 14 work with the sound off.