MovieGaga

How MovieGaga works

The home page opens with a sliding strip of eight wide stills, the most popular titles in the catalogue. Each still carries a title, a row of gold stars and the opening lines of the storyline; slide the strip sideways to see them all. Below it, Latest movies shows the newest films first, TV Series shows the most popular series, and Greatest titles is a ranked list of the twelve highest-rated entries with a gold badge beside each. Rows for family films, true stories and Christmas follow.

Every poster shows a gold rating badge and a year, and beneath it the title and its two leading genres. Pressing a poster opens the title page: a summary, the running time or the count of seasons, the performers, the director, and for a TV series a full list of episodes with their dates. The Watch now button sits beside a country selector. Choose your country, press the button, and JustWatch opens with the subscription, rental, purchase and free services that carry the title where you live.

The bar at the top holds Latest movies, TV Series, Top rated, The 2020s, Comedy, Family and A-Z, and the foot of every page links to each genre list by name. The page on finding titles describes every route, and My List explains the personal queue.

The class of 2016

The catalogue begins in 2016 with fifteen movies, and it is a remarkably strong year. The Jungle Book, directed by Jon Favreau, placed a single young actor, Neel Sethi, in a jungle built entirely by computer, with Bill Murray as the voice of Baloo the bear and Ben Kingsley as Bagheera the panther. Star Trek Beyond marked fifty years of the starship Enterprise by stranding its crew on a distant world. Steven Spielberg filmed Roald Dahl's The BFG with Mark Rylance as the gentle giant who catches dreams in jars, and Pete's Dragon gave an orphan a furry green dragon in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The dramas of the year are among the best-loved titles here. Lion, rated 8.0, follows a five-year-old boy who falls asleep on a train in India and wakes a thousand miles from home; twenty-five years later, raised in Tasmania, he searches for his village with satellite maps. Dev Patel plays the grown Saroo, and he appears again as the self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in The Man Who Knew Infinity. The Founder stars Michael Keaton as the salesman who turned a California hamburger stand into a worldwide chain.

From Ireland came Sing Street, rated 7.9, in which a Dublin schoolboy of the 1980s starts a band to impress a girl, and from New Zealand Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Taika Waititi's comedy about a city boy and his gruff foster uncle on the run through the bush. Eddie the Eagle tells the true story of Britain's most determined ski jumper, Florence Foster Jenkins casts Meryl Streep as the heiress who sang with more joy than accuracy, and Maudie, rated 7.8, is the tender portrait of a Nova Scotia folk painter played by Sally Hawkins. Love & Friendship, from an early Jane Austen story, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 complete a year with something for every taste.

2017 and 2018

Nine movies represent 2017, led by Wonder, rated 8.1 and the highest-rated film of the whole decade here alongside two others. Jacob Tremblay plays Auggie Pullman, a boy born with a facial difference who enters a mainstream school in the fifth grade; Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson are his parents, and the film is generous enough to tell part of the story through his sister and his classmates. A Dog's Purpose follows one devoted dog through several lives, and Goodbye Christopher Robin looks at the real family behind Winnie-the-Pooh. Everything, Everything is a love story for a girl who has spent her life indoors, and Pitch Perfect 3, Table 19 and Home Again supply the comedy.

The year 2018 has eighteen movies and marks a turning point: the arrival of the streaming romance. To All the Boys I've Loved Before, rated 7.6, begins when five secret love letters written by a shy teenager are posted to the boys they describe, and The Kissing Booth turned a school fundraiser into a worldwide hit. Both produced two sequels, all four of which are listed. In cinemas, Crazy Rich Asians took a New York professor to Singapore to meet the wealthiest family she had ever encountered, and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again returned to its Greek island with a fresh set of songs.

The same year was rich in family films. Mary Poppins Returns brought Emily Blunt down from the clouds over London, Christopher Robin reunited a grown man, played by Ewan McGregor, with the bear of his childhood, and The Christmas Chronicles gave Kurt Russell a red coat and a sleigh. Eighth Grade captured the last week of middle school with rare honesty, Stan & Ollie followed Laurel and Hardy on their final tour of British theatres, and The Rider, directed by Chloé Zhao, cast a real rodeo cowboy as a version of himself.

2019, the fullest year

Nineteen movies make 2019 the best-stocked year in the catalogue. The biggest is Jumanji: The Next Level, the most popular film on the site, in which the video game pulls in two grandfathers by mistake, so that Dwayne Johnson spends the film behaving like Danny DeVito and Kevin Hart like Danny Glover. Tim Burton's Dumbo and Dora and the Lost City of Gold kept families busy, and Downton Abbey carried the household of the television series to the cinema for a royal visit.

Three of the year's films are rated near the top of the whole list. Togo, rated 8.1, tells the true story of the sled dog who ran the longest and hardest stretch of the 1925 relay that carried medicine across Alaska, with Willem Dafoe as his musher. The Art of Racing in the Rain, also 8.1, is narrated by a golden retriever who studies his owner, a racing driver, with complete devotion. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, rated 7.9, was directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor and follows a Malawian schoolboy who builds a windmill from scrap to save his village from famine.

Smaller pleasures fill out the year: The Peanut Butter Falcon, a river journey shared by a young man with Down syndrome and a fisherman on the run; Blinded by the Light, about a British Pakistani teenager whose life changes when he hears Bruce Springsteen; The Upside, with Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston; and Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Richard Linklater's film with Cate Blanchett as an architect who vanishes on the eve of a family voyage to Antarctica.

2020 and 2021

In 2020 the cinemas closed for much of the year and the living room became the main screen. The sixteen movies listed from that year show the change clearly: most of them premiered on streaming services. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga sent Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams from a small Icelandic fishing town to the stage of the great song contest. The One and Only Ivan gave a shopping-mall gorilla the voice of Sam Rockwell, Work It and Feel the Beat were dance films, and Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey was a new musical about a toymaker and his granddaughter.

The dramas of 2020 are thoughtful ones. One Night in Miami..., the first film directed by Regina King, imagines a hotel-room conversation between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown on a February night in 1964. Radioactive stars Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie. Words on Bathroom Walls, rated 7.8, is a sensitive story of a gifted young cook living with schizophrenia, and Stargirl is about the new girl who plays her ukulele in the school canteen and changes a quiet boy's year.

Fifteen movies come from 2021. CODA, rated 7.9, went on to win the Academy Award for best picture: Emilia Jones plays the one hearing member of a deaf fishing family in Massachusetts, torn between the boat and a place at music college. King Richard follows the father of Venus and Serena Williams from the public courts of Compton to the professional tour, and Belfast is Kenneth Branagh's memory of his own childhood street in 1969, filmed in black and white. Jungle Cruise put Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt on a riverboat up the Amazon, and two musicals arrived together: In the Heights, set over a hot summer in upper Manhattan, and tick, tick... BOOM!, with Andrew Garfield as the young composer Jonathan Larson. C'mon C'mon and Swan Song are quieter films, each built around a single moving relationship.

2022 to 2025

The eleven movies of 2022 are led by Elvis, Baz Luhrmann's whirl through the life of the king of rock and roll, with Austin Butler in the title part and Tom Hanks as his manager. At 159 minutes it is the longest film in the catalogue. Downton Abbey: A New Era sent half the household to the south of France, Disenchanted brought Amy Adams back as the fairy-tale princess now living in the suburbs, and Slumberland gave Jason Momoa a pair of horns and a dream world to roam. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile features a crocodile who sings in a New York attic with the voice of Shawn Mendes.

The six movies of 2023 are small in number and high in quality. Past Lives, rated 7.7, follows two childhood friends from Seoul who meet again in New York after twenty-four years, and it says more in its silences than most films manage in their speeches. Air, directed by Ben Affleck, tells how a basketball shoe was designed for a rookie named Michael Jordan. Flamin' Hot, rated 8.0, is the cheerful story of a factory janitor with an idea for a spicy snack, and The Burial pairs Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones in a courtroom in Mississippi.

Eight movies come from 2024. The Fall Guy is a love letter to stunt performers, with Ryan Gosling as a stuntman drawn into a mystery on a film set in Sydney. IF, written and directed by John Krasinski, is about a girl who can see the imaginary friends that children have outgrown. A Complete Unknown follows the young Bob Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet, from his arrival in New York to the night he plugged in an electric guitar. Paddington in Peru takes the bear home to visit his aunt, Arthur the King is the true story of a stray dog who joined an endurance race, and Here watches a single living room across many generations.

The newest titles are three movies from 2025: Freakier Friday, which reunites Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis for another body swap, this time involving four people; Good Fortune, with Keanu Reeves as a well-meaning guardian angel; and The Life List, in which a young woman completes the list of wishes she wrote at thirteen. The page on the latest movies keeps the newest arrivals together.

The TV series

The fifty-eight series all began between 2016 and 2025, and they show how varied television became in those years. Some are built for the long haul. The Neighborhood is the largest, with 155 episodes over eight seasons of a comedy about two families who live side by side in California. The Good Doctor has 126 episodes, Raven's Home 122, The Resident 107 and American Housewife 103. Others are finished in an evening or two: Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker and Man vs Baby run for four episodes each, Amazing Stories for five, and The English Game, about the working men who changed football in Victorian England, for six.

The series of ideas are the pride of the list. Severance, rated 8.4, imagines an office whose employees have agreed to split their memories in two, so that the self at work knows only work and the self at home knows only home; its nineteen episodes are a puzzle, a satire and a mystery at once. The Good Place, rated 8.0 across fifty episodes, begins with a woman who arrives in a heavenly neighbourhood by clerical error, and turns into a four-season comedy about how to be a better person. Travelers sends agents from the future into the present day to change the course of history, one small mission at a time.

The page on the TV series lists the long runs and the short ones side by side.

Hospital dramas

Three hospital series stand close to the top of the ratings. The Good Doctor, the highest-rated title on MovieGaga at 8.5, stars Freddie Highmore as Shaun Murphy, a young surgeon with autism whose way of seeing a problem saves patients his colleagues have given up on. Over seven seasons he grows from a newcomer whom the board hesitates to hire into a teacher, a husband and a father.

The Resident, rated 8.4, is set in an Atlanta hospital and takes a sharper view of the business side of medicine, seen through an idealistic young doctor and the senior resident who trains him. New Amsterdam, rated 8.3, follows the new medical director of the oldest public hospital in America, whose first question to everyone he meets is how he can help. Its 89 episodes are full of practical kindness.

For younger viewers, Doogie Kamealoha, M.D. moves the idea of a teenage doctor to Hawaii, where a sixteen-year-old balances the ward and the waves. The hospital dramas page gathers all four.

Comedy on television

Twenty-eight of the series are comedies. Derry Girls, rated 8.1, follows five schoolfriends in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, and its nineteen episodes are packed with jokes at a speed that rewards a second viewing. Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage, rated 8.0, continues the story of a young Texas family, and Young Rock has Dwayne Johnson looking back on his own childhood among professional wrestlers.

Rowan Atkinson appears twice, in Man vs Bee and Man vs Baby, two short comedies of escalating disaster that need hardly a word of dialogue. Acapulco is a sunny bilingual series about a young man who lands his dream job at a Mexican resort in 1984. Schmigadoon! drops a modern couple into a town where everyone behaves as if they were in a 1940s musical, and The Four Seasons follows three couples through a year of holidays together.

Family comedies form a group of their own: Fuller House, iCarly, Andi Mack, rated 8.0, Raven's Home and The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, each of them a new chapter of a story that parents will remember from their own childhood.

Fantasy, history and growing up

The series list has its share of other worlds. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, rated 7.8, is a marvel of puppetry, ten episodes set on the planet Thra with every creature built and performed by hand. Willow continues the 1988 fantasy film with a new quest, The Winchesters tells a love story among hunters of the supernatural, and Marvel's Cloak & Dagger pairs two teenagers whose powers work best together. In science fiction, Away follows the commander of the first crewed voyage to Mars, The Ark and Earth Abides imagine humanity starting again, and Quantum Leap revives the classic series about a scientist who jumps from life to life through time. Knuckles gives the red echidna of the Sonic films six episodes of his own.

History has a strong bench. Victoria follows the young queen from her accession at eighteen, and The Gilded Age, from the writer of Downton Abbey, sets old New York money against new in the 1880s. All Creatures Great & Small, rated 8.2, is the gentlest series in the catalogue: a young vet arrives in the Yorkshire Dales in 1937 and learns his trade among farmers, cattle and one very spoiled Pekingese. Genius devotes whole seasons to Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Aretha Franklin, and Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker stars Octavia Spencer as the washerwoman who became a millionaire.

Stories of growing up complete the list. The Baby-Sitters Club, rated 7.9, updates the beloved books with real warmth. High School Musical: The Musical: The Series is set at the school where the original film was shot, Big Shot sends a fiery basketball coach to a girls' academy, and Spinning Out goes behind the scenes of competitive figure skating. Free Rein, Greenhouse Academy, Swagger and My Life with the Walter Boys each find their drama in a new school, a new team or a new home, and Sweet Magnolias, From Scratch and Dash & Lily offer romance for an older audience.

The top rated list

The Top rated list holds every title with a score of 7.5 or higher from a meaningful number of voters. Fifty-one titles qualify, and fourteen of them reach 8.0. Television leads: The Good Doctor at 8.5, Severance and The Resident at 8.4, New Amsterdam at 8.3 and All Creatures Great & Small at 8.2. Three movies share the best film score of 8.1, namely Wonder, Togo and The Art of Racing in the Rain, with Derry Girls level beside them and Lion and Flamin' Hot at 8.0.

It is striking how many of the leaders are stories of kindness: a surgeon who sees differently, a boy facing a new school, a dog who gives everything for his team. The list is a reliable place to begin for anyone new to the site, and the Greatest titles panel on the home page shows its first twelve entries at a glance. The page on the top rated titles points out a few that are easy to miss.

Family films

Thirty-three movies carry the Family label, and they divide naturally into three kinds. The first is the return of a classic character. The Jungle Book, Dumbo, Pete's Dragon and Cinderella are new versions of old favourites; Mary Poppins Returns and Disenchanted are sequels made decades after the originals; Christopher Robin and Paddington in Peru bring two of the best-loved bears in English literature back to the screen.

The second kind is the animal story, which had a golden run in these years. A Dog's Purpose and A Dog's Way Home, in which a dog walks four hundred miles across the Rockies to find her owner, come from books by the same author. Togo and Arthur the King are true. The One and Only Ivan is based on a real gorilla who learned to paint, and Dolittle surrounds Robert Downey Jr. with a talking menagerie.

The third kind is pure imagination: the dream world of Slumberland, the forgotten friends of IF, the giants of The BFG, the leap across the universe in A Wrinkle in Time and the toy workshop of Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. The family movies page sorts them for a first visit.

Adventure and fantasy

Fifty-four titles, movies and series together, sit on the Adventure and fantasy list. The grandest are journeys: up the Amazon in Jungle Cruise, into the game in Jumanji: The Next Level, through the Peruvian jungle in Dora and the Lost City of Gold, and beyond the edge of charted space in Star Trek Beyond. Hunt for the Wilderpeople proves that a small budget and the New Zealand bush are enough for a chase as exciting as any of them.

Fantasy runs from fairy tale to comedy. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms opens a door from a Victorian Christmas party into a land of sweets and snow, The King's Daughter places a mermaid at the court of Louis XIV, and Bill & Ted Face the Music sends two middle-aged rockers through time in search of the song that will save the universe. Good Fortune and Freakier Friday use magic for laughs. The page on adventure and fantasy covers the series on the list as well.

Comedy

Comedy is the largest list, with seventy-three movies. Some are star vehicles in the old style: Melissa McCarthy returning to university beside her daughter in Life of the Party, Kevin James coaching a hopeless boys' football team in Home Team, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg welcoming their own fathers for the holidays in Daddy's Home 2. Uncle Drew disguises a team of basketball greats as pensioners, and An American Pickle has Seth Rogen play both a 1919 immigrant preserved in brine for a century and his own great-grandson.

Others are comedies of character. The Upside pairs a wealthy man who uses a wheelchair with an assistant fresh from prison, and each improves the other's life. Table 19 seats the least-wanted guests at a wedding together and lets them become friends. Second Act gives Jennifer Lopez a second chance at a career, and Where'd You Go, Bernadette finds the comedy in a brilliant woman's restlessness. The page on comedy suggests a few pairings.

Romance

Forty-six love stories are listed, and the streaming romance is their backbone. The three films that follow Lara Jean and Peter, beginning with To All the Boys I've Loved Before, are among the most charming of the decade, and Noah Centineo, who plays Peter, appears in a fourth film here, The Perfect Date. The three The Kissing Booth films follow Elle from her junior year to the summer before university. Tall Girl, Status Update, The Sun Is Also a Star and Love at First Sight, which begins with a missed flight at a New York airport, speak to the same audience.

For grown-ups there is Past Lives, Crazy Rich Asians, Your Place or Mine, in which two old friends swap homes for a week, and a pair of wine-country romances, A Perfect Pairing and Falling Inn Love, both of which send a city professional to the southern hemisphere. Upgraded moves a young art intern from economy class to first and into a small fib that grows. Jane Austen is represented twice, by Persuasion and Love & Friendship, and Little Italy retells Romeo and Juliet with two rival pizzerias. See the romance page for more.

Sport on screen

Sport runs through the catalogue like a second season. On the tennis court there is King Richard; on the basketball court Air, Uncle Drew and the series Swagger, which follows a gifted fourteen-year-old through the world of youth basketball, and Big Shot. Home Team is about American football for twelve-year-olds, and The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers returns to the ice rink where a team of misfits once learned to fly in formation.

Winter sport has two fine entries. Eddie the Eagle is the story of a plasterer from Cheltenham who taught himself to ski jump and reached the 1988 Olympics through sheer persistence, with Hugh Jackman as his reluctant coach. Spinning Out is a ten-episode drama about a figure skater rebuilding her career as half of a pair. On horseback there is The Rider and the series Free Rein; behind the wheel, The Art of Racing in the Rain; and on the trail, the endurance racers of Arthur the King and the sled teams of Togo. The English Game goes back to the 1870s to show how football passed from the public schools to the mill towns.

Around the world in 178 titles

The decade's films travelled widely, and a viewer can choose an evening by destination. Britain and Ireland are strongly represented: the Yorkshire of All Creatures Great & Small and both Downton Abbey films, the London of Mary Poppins Returns and Christopher Robin, the Dublin of Sing Street, the city streets of Belfast and Derry Girls, and the Luton of Blinded by the Light. France appears in Radioactive and at the court of The King's Daughter.

Further afield, Lion moves between India and Tasmania, Crazy Rich Asians is a tour of Singapore, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was filmed in Malawi, and Past Lives begins in Seoul. Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Falling Inn Love show two sides of New Zealand, The Fall Guy makes the most of Sydney Harbour, and Paddington in Peru climbs into the Andes. Acapulco spends four seasons by a Mexican swimming pool, and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again returns to the blue water of the Aegean.

The United States is seen from every angle: the Manhattan of In the Heights and Dash & Lily, the Massachusetts harbour of CODA, the Alaska of Togo, the Hawaii of Doogie Kamealoha, M.D., the South Dakota plains of The Rider and the North Carolina rivers of The Peanut Butter Falcon.

Sequels, trilogies and returns

These were years of return visits, and the catalogue reflects it. Two complete trilogies are present, the three films of Lara Jean and the three of the kissing booth, and each can be watched across a weekend. The Christmas Chronicles has its second part, and the two Downton Abbey films continue a story that television began.

Several titles pick up a thread after a very long pause. Mary Poppins Returns arrived fifty-four years after the original film. Bill & Ted Face the Music came twenty-nine years after the pair's previous adventure, Freakier Friday twenty-two years after the first swap, and Disenchanted fifteen years after its princess first climbed out of a manhole in Times Square. On television, Fuller House, iCarly, Raven's Home, Quantum Leap, Willow and The Wonder Years all revisit worlds that an earlier generation knew well. Each is written so that a newcomer can start here, and each rewards those who remember.

A title page in detail

Every title page is laid out the same way, so a visitor learns it once. At the top stand the poster, the title, the year, the running time and the genres, with the storyline beside them and two buttons: Watch now and the list button. A panel headed Where to watch holds the country selector. Below it, a table sets out the original title, the release date, the language, the country, the studio and the audience rating with its count of votes.

The cast follows, with the name of each performer and the part played, and then the director or, for a TV series, the creators. A series page continues with every season in order and every episode under it: its number, its title, its date and a line of summary. The page for The Good Doctor lists all 126 episodes this way, and the page for Man vs Bee all nine. Related titles close the page, chosen from the same lists, so that one good evening leads to the next.

Searching is just as direct. The field in the top bar accepts a title, a performer, a director or a year, and for a TV series it also understands a season and an episode number typed after the name. Results appear as posters with the same gold badges as the rest of the site.

Made for the living room

One feature sets this decade apart from every earlier one: a large share of its films were made for streaming services and reached their audience at home on the day of release. More than forty of the movies listed here arrived that way. They include every film in the two teenage trilogies, most of the Christmas romances, dance films such as Work It, family adventures such as Slumberland and A Boy Called Christmas, and prize-winners such as CODA and tick, tick... BOOM!.

The result is a kind of film that suits a guide like this one particularly well. These are stories designed for an evening on the sofa: bright, well paced, friendly to a mixed audience, and usually under two hours. Cinema releases bring the scale, with Jumanji: The Next Level, Jungle Cruise and Elvis built for the largest screen available. MovieGaga lists both kinds side by side, and the Watch now button shows where each can be seen today.

The decade in brief

Seen whole, the ten years have a clear shape. They open in 2016 with a burst of cinema craft, from a computer-built jungle to a Dublin school band. The years to 2019 belong to the big family film and to the first wave of streaming romances. In 2020 and 2021 the living room takes over, and the catalogue fills with musicals, dance films and thoughtful dramas that premiered at home. From 2022 the cinema returns with Elvis and The Fall Guy, while television, in Severance and The Gilded Age, grows ever more ambitious.

Through all of it, a few tastes stay constant: a fondness for dogs and bears, for true stories of stubborn people, for Christmas, and for second chances. Those tastes are the character of MovieGaga. The two decade lists in the menu and at the foot of the page, 2016 to 2019 and The 2020s, divide the movies almost exactly in half, sixty-one and fifty-nine, and offer a simple way to explore one era at a time.

True stories

Twenty-seven titles are drawn from real lives, and together they form a small library of biography. Sport provides King Richard, Air, Eddie the Eagle and The English Game. Science provides Radioactive and The Man Who Knew Infinity, and plain ingenuity The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and Flamin' Hot. Business has The Founder and the courtroom The Burial.

The arts are especially well served. Elvis and A Complete Unknown cover two of the central figures of American popular music, Maudie a painter, Stan & Ollie two comedians, and Being the Ricardos, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, one tense week in the making of a famous television comedy, with Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball. Goodbye Christopher Robin shows how a father's stories for his son became the property of the world, and Belfast and Lion are true stories told by the people who lived them. The true stories page arranges them by field.

Music and dance

The Music list has twenty-four titles. The biographies are the heavyweights, yet the musicals may be the most fun. In the Heights, directed by Jon M. Chu from the stage show by Lin-Manuel Miranda, fills a Manhattan neighbourhood with dancing, including a number performed up the side of an apartment building. Miranda himself directed tick, tick... BOOM! and sings as a lamplighter in Mary Poppins Returns. Cinderella of 2021 retells the fairy tale with pop songs and Camila Cabello in the glass slippers.

CODA and Sing Street are stories about what music can open up for a young person, and both end with a performance that is hard to watch with dry eyes. Work It follows a student who starts a dance team to win a place at her chosen university, Feel the Beat sends a Broadway hopeful home to coach a troupe of small-town children, and A Cinderella Story: If the Shoe Fits sets the fairy tale at a musical audition. On television, Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist lets its heroine hear the feelings of others as songs. The music page has the full selection.

Christmas

Sixteen titles are set aside for December. The Christmas Chronicles and its sequel present Kurt Russell as a Santa Claus with a sense of humour and a fine singing voice. Noelle imagines that Santa has a sister, played by Anna Kendrick, who turns out to be better suited to the job than her brother. A Boy Called Christmas tells the origin of the whole legend as a snowy adventure in Finland, and the series The Santa Clauses brings Tim Allen back to the North Pole as he looks for a successor.

The romances are a tradition in themselves. The Knight Before Christmas transports a medieval knight to modern Ohio, A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding plans a ceremony in a snowbound kingdom, and Christmas Inheritance sends an heiress to a small town to learn the family business from the bottom. Lindsay Lohan stars in two: Falling for Christmas, as an heiress with amnesia at a ski lodge, and Our Little Secret. Love Hard begins with a long flight to meet an online match, and Dash & Lily trades messages in a red notebook around New York. The Christmas page lists them all.

From the page

Forty-five titles began as books, a quarter of the catalogue. Children's literature gives The BFG, A Wrinkle in Time, The One and Only Ivan, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile and The Mysterious Benedict Society, a series about four gifted orphans on a secret mission. Young-adult fiction gives Wonder, Everything, Everything, Stargirl, Words on Bathroom Walls and the two big streaming trilogies. Memoir gives Lion and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, and the classics give Persuasion and The Jungle Book. The from books page makes a good reading list as well as a viewing list.

Faces of the decade

A few performers return again and again. Hugh Bonneville appears in four titles: as the Earl of Grantham in both Downton Abbey films, as Mr Brown in Paddington in Peru and in Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. Pierce Brosnan also has four, among them a king in Cinderella and The King's Daughter and a singing father in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Emily Blunt leads three films, Mary Poppins Returns, Jungle Cruise and The Fall Guy, and Anna Kendrick three, Pitch Perfect 3, Table 19 and Noelle.

Sofia Carson stars in Feel the Beat, A Cinderella Story: If the Shoe Fits and The Life List, and Dwayne Johnson is present on both screens, in two films and in Young Rock. Among directors, Simon Curtis has three films, Goodbye Christopher Robin, The Art of Racing in the Rain and Downton Abbey: A New Era; Lasse Hallström and Jon M. Chu have two each. Type any of these names in the search field and the titles appear together.

Planning an evening

With 178 titles to choose from, a simple plan helps. For a family with young children, begin with Christopher Robin or The One and Only Ivan; with older children, Jumanji: The Next Level or Hunt for the Wilderpeople. For a quiet night for two, Past Lives or Love at First Sight. For something to talk about afterwards, One Night in Miami... or CODA. For a weekend with a series, Severance if you enjoy a puzzle, Derry Girls if you want to laugh, All Creatures Great & Small if you want to feel that all is right with the world.

The running times help with planning too. The shortest film is Table 19 at 87 minutes, the longest Elvis at 159, and most fall between an hour and a half and two hours. Save anything that catches your eye to My List as you browse, and the queue will be waiting the next time you open the site.

Questions and answers

Questions