Shelf

The Cinnamon Hundred

The highest Cinnamon Scores in the catalogue. Not the best films ever made -- the ones you cannot get anywhere else, and that earn it. Laid out oldest to newest, because they do not have an order.

Every list of great films is the same list. This one is not, because it is not ranking quality: it is ranking how far a film sits from everything else in the catalogue, and then asking whether it delivers on that. Some of the usual canon clears that bar. A great deal of it does not, and a great deal of what does clear it has never appeared on a list like this before. There is no number one. At the top the measure runs out of room -- the leading films are separated by less than it can resolve -- so putting them in order would mean ordering them by something else, and the only thing available was how many people had voted. A list whose whole claim is that it is not a popularity ranking should not quietly become one at the top, so these are laid out by year instead.

Article

The 38 Percent

Twenty numbers about how a film feels predict 38% of what audiences think of it — no cast, no director, no budget, no genre. Beauty does half again more work than anything else, and hope does none at all.

The whole scored catalogue · measured 23 September 2026

Article

The Strangest Films Ever Made

The average film sits 4.41 from the centre of the catalogue across all twenty readings at once. Sixty-six films in fourteen thousand get past 7, and one past 8.5 — but the far edge is not the dark end of cinema. It has two ends, and unbroken gentleness is as far out as unbroken cruelty.

13,979 well-known films · measured 24 September 2026

Shelf

Sad and funny at once

Thirty-two films hold grief and playfulness at full strength simultaneously. It is the hardest trick in cinema and almost nobody lands it.

Grief and playfulness at full strength in the same film. It is the hardest trick in cinema and almost nobody lands it, which is why the list is short.

Article

The Rarest Thing in Cinema

Sad and funny at once is talked about as though it were a genre, and people can name the films instantly — because there are almost none. Thirty films out of fourteen thousand clear one standard deviation on both melancholy and playfulness. Past one and a half, the count is zero.

13,979 well-known films · measured 24 September 2026

Article

Nothing Else Like It

The whole site rests on the promise that if you liked one thing there is another thing near it. The typical film has something 1.43 away. Seventeen films out of fourteen thousand have nothing closer than 3 — and those are the ones where the honest recommendation is that there is not one.

13,979 well-known films · measured 24 September 2026

Shelf

The Cinnamon Hundred: Television

The highest Cinnamon Scores in the television catalogue. Not the best series ever made -- the ones you cannot get anywhere else, and that earn it.

Shelf

Television that will not let you relax

The other end of the TV catalogue: series that run on dread rather than company.

The other end of the television catalogue: series that run on dread rather than company. A smaller and more deliberate group than its film equivalent, because television leans the other way.

Shelf

Nothing but joy

High energy, no shadow. The films that want nothing from you except that you enjoy them.

High energy, no shadow. Films that want nothing from you except that you enjoy them. The crowd systematically under-rates them, which is a reason to have a shelf of them rather than a reason to dismiss them.

Shelf

Worth the two and a half hours

The long ones. Films that run well past two hours are, as a group, rated distinctly higher than short ones -- and they buy that with weight, not with charm.

Films over two and a half hours, which as a group are rated distinctly higher than short ones. Length also buys existential weight and costs playfulness, every time.

Shelf

The heaviest cinema in the world

German-language film, which measures as the most melancholy and the most existentially weighted of any major national cinema.

German-language film, which measures as the most melancholy and the most existentially weighted of any major national cinema. Korean comes close on sadness but carries it with far more violence.

Shelf

The strangest cinema in the world

Japanese film, which measures stranger than any other national cinema by a clear margin.

Japanese film, which measures stranger than any other national cinema by a clear margin -- the widest national gap on any single reading in the catalogue. Strangeness costs a film with audiences, which is a fact about raters rather than about the films.

Shelf

Nothing Else Is Close

The films with the emptiest space around them: measured against every other film of their kind, nothing comes near.

Singularity is not evenly distributed. Films that sit far from everything else are, on average, better regarded than films with close neighbours -- and the ones at the very top tend to share a habit: each removed something almost every other film keeps. A second location. A second act. A cut.

Shelf

Nothing Else Is Close: Television

Series with no near relatives. Measured against television only, never against film.

A series has more room to be strange than a film does, and the ones that use it rarely look like anything else on this list either.