I first started rating movies I see after I moved to Boston in early December 1996 (I lived there till August 2001). I originally started doing it chronologically on a small notepad, then converted it to a simple HTML list by title and by rating. After I moved back to Ottawa, I began to work with the great web development and design team Lapbaby, and iteratively they converted it into a database, with links to IMDb and to TMDB, and with searching by title, rating, decade, and keyword, as well as an ongoing summary of the summary numbers.
I used the following ratings:
0 ■ junk = These are movies with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The worst of the worst are ones which are not only junk, but have pretensions to being great, but with the whole mess handled hamhandedly.
1 ■ average = These are merely watchable movies. Not really good, not really bad. Ho-hum. Meh.
2 ■ good = Better than average but not great. Sometimes just merely good.
3 ■ excellent = Excellent movies have characteristics of greatness about them – they are very good, and much better than about 9 out of 10 of all other movies.
4 ■ superior = These movies are those rare works of art, combining aesthetics and intelligence.
I stopped updating that database in late April 2025, after more than 27 years. Now I simply maintain a list of what I call outstanding movies. These are movies that I would have rated 4, and so are the best of the best. There are not many movies like this. In fact, when I do the math on 27 years of watching, on average only one movie of this quality is released every year.
The first movie I ever rated was Breaking the Waves, which I saw at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, MA, in early December 1996. The 2,000th one, which I watched at home in Kingston, ON, on New Year’s Eve 2010, was Die, Monster, Die!, which is also the first movie that I have a memory of seeing in any cinema: it was at the old Regent theatre in Corner Brook, NL, likely in the mid- or late 1960s. The 3,000th movie I watched was in my condo in Ottawa, ON, over December 28–29, 2022, called Scarborough. And the last movie I rated for this database, the 3,271st one, was a made-in-Newfoundland movie called Skeet, which I watched with my friend Gwen in the theatre at the Avalon Mall in St. John’s, NL, on April 15, 2025.