How Lantern works

What it pays attention to

Lantern knows who made what: directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, composers, editors. When you name a film or a person, it looks for films that share those people — and then for the people those films share, and outward from there. Everything below follows from that one fact.

Every name you add changes the order

This is the part that surprises people. Adding a second name doesn’t hand you everything matching either one, and it doesn’t give you a longer list — the list is the same length either way. What changes is what sits at the top: films connected to all the names you gave rise above films connected to only one.

So adding names isn’t asking for more. It’s asking for something more specific.

Three ways to add a name

Each name you add can be set to one of three things, and the difference matters more than it looks.

• Like blends it in. Films close to it rise, along with everything else you’ve named.
• Must have is a hard requirement. Every result has to match it — a person has to be credited, a film has to share cast or key crew. Nothing that misses it gets through, however good it looks otherwise.
• Exclude steers away rather than banning. It pushes films connected to that name down the list instead of removing them, so something excellent that happens to be linked to it can still appear.

It leans towards films people liked, and saw

Two gentle nudges sit on top of everything: better-rated films rise a little, and widely-seen films rise a little. That keeps results from becoming a parade of things nobody has heard of — but it does mean Lantern errs towards the recognisable. If you’re hunting something truly obscure, it’s working slightly against you.

It doesn’t learn about you

The same query gives the same results, whoever is asking. Lantern builds no profile from what you click, watch or linger on, and nothing happens in the background. The only things that change your results are what you type, the filters you set, and — if you ask it to — the films you’ve saved as favourites.

Every result shows its reasons

Each film says which of your names it connects to and who connects them, along with how its score was made up. If something looks wrong, you can see what Lantern thought and judge it. Being able to disagree with the answer is the point — this is a tool, not an oracle.

What Lantern can’t see

• Films only. No series, no shorts, no made-for-TV films.
• Films with at least 200 IMDb votes. Something very new, or very obscure, may simply not be there yet.
• Streaming for the 30,000 most-voted films, across 31 European countries. Beyond that, Lantern doesn’t know where to watch it.
• Plot and themes. Lantern works from the people involved, not from what a film is about.
• Credits as good as IMDb’s. Thorough for recent and English-language cinema, thinner the further back and further afield you go.
• No reviews, no scores of our own, no comments. That’s deliberate, and not likely to change.

Where the data comes from

Credits, titles and ratings come from the IMDb non-commercial datasets, used non-commercially. Posters, synopses, trailers and streaming availability come from TMDB, whose streaming data comes from JustWatch. This website uses TMDB and the TMDB APIs but is not endorsed, certified, or otherwise approved by TMDB.

None of that data is ours, and Lantern doesn’t change it. What Lantern adds is the ranking, and the reasons.

Why it exists

Lantern was built by someone who kept losing half an hour to scrolling, giving up, and putting on something he’d already seen. There was never a shortage of films — only a shortage of ways to ask for the one he was in the mood for.

It’s non-commercial. No advertising, nothing for sale, nothing to sign up for unless you want your lists kept.