I’m a movie lover and this is the one app I cannot do without

Doing activities alone can be daunting, but going to the cinema on my own has always been something that I am more than comfortable with. I can treat myself to my snack of choice, settle in as the lights go down and think of nothing else except the film in front of my eyeballs for two hours.

One thing I do miss when seeing a movie on my own, though, is getting to chat about it with friends afterwards. Reading reviews from critics certainly helps to fill the gap, but it’s missing the initial spilling of thoughts that comes with that moment of first walking out the cinema.

For me, that’s when Letterboxd comes in.

Available in app or desktop form, the social network platform lets you see what your friends are watching as well as connect with other movie lovers.

I can log a film and rate it from one to five (with half stars included), as well as see what my pals who have seen the film wrote about it.

There is also a diary feature so users can track what films they have watched or rewatched over the years, as well as a watchlist. You can also choose your four favourite films to come up on your profile, which is just quite fun to debate and discuss with others.

Of course, Letterboxd is far from the first platform to include these features. IMDb has historically been the most popular site to keep track of movie habits, but it seems that the younger generation is being swayed by Letterboxd’s bigger sense of community.

Since its launch in 2011, it has gained millions of active users, with most of them aged under 35. Even though its user base is on the younger side, an impressive number of indie and arthouse films are usually in the ‘popular this week’ section.

If you take a gander at the top five highest rated movies on the site, you’ll see a more diverse selection of films compared with IMBDb’s equivalent list (although 12 Angry Men makes an appearance on both).

In the past, though, there have been a fair number of issues with the server, where the site is sometimes inaccessible for hours or occasionally days at a time. Those blips seem to have been smoothed out for the most part recently, but they are obviously quite frustrating.

TV shows have also not been added to the app officially yet, although there are reportedly plans to change this.

All that is not nearly enough to deter me from using it as my main way of logging movies, though.

One of the biggest draws for me is that there is no pressure to leave a lengthy review detailing every thought you had about a film. Instead, most people feel satisfied with just a sentence or two more in the vein of first thoughts rather than developed essays.

For example, one user reviewing Mad Max: Fury Road summed up their four-and-a-half star viewing experience with the simple words: "Or as we Australians call it, Tuesday."

It's encouraging to see the younger generation re-discovering films that have been left to gather dust on the digital shelves, as well as celebrate new releases with an enthusiasm that has felt lacking in the past decade.

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