Movies don't have genres. They have feelings.
We built MovieCravings because "action" and "drama" never told us what we actually needed to watch.
The problem with genre.
You've been there. It's 9pm. You want to watch something. You open Netflix, scroll for 40 minutes, and give up. The problem isn't the number of movies — it's that genre labels describe what happens in a film, not how it makes you feel. "Thriller" could mean edge-of-seat dread or slow-burn paranoia. "Drama" could mean cathartic weeping or quiet contemplation. We wanted a better map.
Emotional indexing, explained.
We analyze thousands of real viewer reviews from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Letterboxd — not critic summaries, but the raw language people use when they describe how a film made them feel.
Our system ingests hundreds of thousands of viewer reviews, focusing on emotional language: words like "haunting," "uplifting," "devastating," "cozy," "unsettling."
Natural language processing identifies emotional clusters — not just positive/negative, but nuanced states like "bittersweet," "quietly triumphant," or "creeping dread."
A single reviewer calling a film "terrifying" matters less than 4,000 reviewers independently reaching for the same word. Consensus builds the emotional fingerprint.
When you tell us how you're feeling — or take the Mood Finder quiz — we surface films whose emotional fingerprint matches what you're actually craving right now.
Built by a film lover who is also a "mood" watcher.
MovieCravings started as an idea while watching browsing streaming services. Over and over, the algorithm gives you what it thinks you want based on past interactions and similarities across data points like genre, big budget versus indie, who made the movie, and who stars in it. That helps, but not all of the time, which is why you sometimes end up spending more time searching than watching . We believe the best movie recommendation comes from understanding how you feel — not just what you've watched before.
UX nerd and movie lover who has to be "in the mood" for the movie she's watching.
Movie blogger, data nerd, and patient husband waiting too long to watch movies because of his wife.
Ready to find your craving?
Take the Mood Finder — it takes 60 seconds.