Sightlines · how it works
Sightlines is a hand-built atlas of nearly 2,000 films. You can browse it, search it by mood, and trace how films influenced one another — and you can build your own lists, save them as PDFs or shareable links, and generate short film courses. Here's how, piece by piece.
The flow most people want — from browsing to a saved list or course:
Shortcut: already have a list on Letterboxd? Paste its URL on the Bring your films page and jump straight to the hidden through-lines running through it — and a course made from them.
That's the whole thing. The rest of this page explains each piece.
Sightlines began as an atlas of the films at the heart of cinema's craft lineage — the ones with decades of scholarship behind them. Each of those carries a full reading: a scholarly essay on the film's craft and authorship, its place in the web of influence, and, where it applies, the film-theory layer.
Around that core sits a second shelf — the art-house, special-interest, and offbeat titles you'd once have hunted for in the back room of a good video store: contemporary, genre, and international films the wider film culture has taken to heart. You'll spot them by a small amber ◇. They carry a cinephile dossier — what the film is, who made it, and why it matters — but not the full essay-and-theory reading reserved for the core.
The split isn't about quality. It's about how much has been written: the core films have been argued over for decades, so there's a real reading to give; the offbeat shelf gets a dossier that tells you what you need to know. Either way they're fully part of the atlas — they share the same categories, and you can add them to lists and courses like any other film.
The whole collection, always. The Atlas and Explore show every film — nearly three thousand, newest to oldest — and search and categories reach all of them. Narrow with a genre, a decade, or a search; click a chip again to clear it.
On Ask, describe what you're in the mood for in plain language — "suspenseful but not too violent," "a classic noir but not black and white," "something by Lynne Ramsay" — and Sightlines answers only with films it actually holds, ranked by its categories and lines of influence. You can name a director and it narrows to their films. It never invents a title.
Once results appear, three sliders slide into view at the top under "Reshape every result." They re-rank the films you already have — instantly, right in the page — so you can nudge the whole set toward the taste you're after without asking again:
Leave a slider centred and it has no effect; drag it and the ranking shifts live. They're sensitive — small moves matter, so nudge gently. Because they only re-sort the films already on screen, there's no new search and nothing to wait for — reshape as much as you like, and hit Reset to return to the original order.
The Facets page is exploration you play rather than type. It separates two different things a film has:
The sliders don't just re-rank — they progressively narrow: nudge one and films merely lean that way; push it to the extreme and only the films that truly sit there survive. Combine a few and the set tightens toward exactly the feel you're after. Each dial is computed from how every film actually reads, so “queasy” or “cerebral” means what it says.
Start from a film — or several. There's a search box at the top: type any film — even one we don't have — and Sightlines seeds the page with its nearest kin. You can pit one film against another (type “Heat vs Drive”) to explore the space they share, paste up to six films (the list a friend swears by) to find their common ground, or type a director's name to seed from their filmography. Then refine with the sliders and category chips. And the whole view lives in the web address: hit ⧉ Share this view to hand someone a link that opens the exact exploration you built — a great way to say “films like this, but weirder.”
When two films face off, you get a lean dial. On a versus view (“Heat vs Drive”), a Lean toward control appears — slide it toward either film (or hold the middle) and the collection re-ranks live around the one you favour, with Scope and Style toggles to say what kind of resemblance you mean. The lean is part of the shareable link too, so “more Drive than Heat, please” travels intact.
Click any poster and you land on that film's own page, which offers a few lenses on the same title:
What a “lineage” is. A lineage in Sightlines is never “these are both sci-fi.” It's a specific craft debt — a technique, a collaborator's method, a genre innovation, a formal device — that one film inherits from another, named precisely enough that a cinephile could defend the link. The Trace page and the Lineage tab both let you walk this graph, film to film. Alongside the debts the atlas infers, a film also surfaces the influences its director has named out loud — kept separate and labelled as declared, so first-hand acknowledgements stand apart from inferred kinship.
The Theory page vs. the Essays. A film's theory page is a focused reading of that one title through Deleuze's Cinema books — the same concept layer the Galaxy maps (more below). The Essays tab is something wider: standalone, long-form criticism on films, directors, movements, genres, and techniques — the kind of piece you'd read in a good film magazine.
The + button appears on every film poster, everywhere on the site — Explore, Facets, Atlas, Trace, Ask results, recommendations. Click it to add a film; click again to remove it. As soon as you've picked one, a ▸ 3 films pill appears at the bottom-right of the screen with two choices:
Hand-pick, or grab the whole set. Add films one at a time with the +, or — once you've filtered on Facets or Explore, or run a search on Ask — hit + Add all to list to drop everything on screen in at once, then prune. Your list is remembered in your browser and carried in the page's link, so nothing is lost if you keep browsing. The ✕ on the pill clears it.
On the list page, each film shows its year, director, runtime, and genres. Three buttons across the top:
There are two ways in. From any list, click Make a course. Or start from nothing on the course builder: type whatever you have — a director's name, a few film titles, a Letterboxd list URL, or just an idea (“paranoia in the 70s”) — Sightlines works out what you mean, shows you the films as a checklist, and offers a Film, Director, or Theory course (the theory version draws on the collection's real Deleuzian readings). Either way, Sightlines writes a full, guided film course the way a great teacher would — it finds the through-line connecting your films, orders them so the arc flows, and writes each one up with no spoilers and no jargon. It takes about half a minute the first time.
The builder also has a “Quick four from a watchlist” mode: paste a Letterboxd watchlist (or a few titles) and Sightlines picks the strongest four, lets you drag posters to swap any you like, then writes a fast, shareable four-film course with a downloadable poster card and a post-ready intro — the same flow offered on the Bring your films page.
The Bring your films page (Your Films in the nav) turns films you already love into something new. Give it your films any way you like:
Then do something with them — every result gets a shareable link:
It's the quickest way to get a genuinely interesting course out of Sightlines: drop in a list you — or a friend — already made, and watch the threads it didn't know it had rise to the surface.
Letterboxd's profile ritual — your four favorite films — gets its own page: sightlines.media/four. Paste a screenshot of any four-favorites grid (yours, or one from a tweet) and Sightlines reads the posters; or just type the four titles. Then it shows you what your four point to:
Everything above reads films. Find your style turns the lens around and reads the viewer. Enter your Letterboxd username and Sightlines pulls the films from your lists, matches them to the atlas, and writes your film personality — not "you like dramas," but the specific shape of your eye.
No reviews, no ratings, no "people like you also watched" — just an honest reading of your sensibility from the films you've gathered.
On Explore (and on the recommendations page) there's a box: “…or enter a film we don't have.” Type any title — even a brand-new release the collection doesn't hold — and Sightlines does its best to surface the closest kindred films from the collection, by shared categories and sensibility. From there you can build a list or make a course as usual.
Alongside its categories and lineage, every film in Sightlines carries a reading through the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze — and you don't need to have read a word of him to use it.
Deleuze was a French philosopher who did something unusual in two books, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2: he didn't review films, he built a whole system for describing what cinema does with movement and time. Nearly everything in that system hangs off two big ideas:
Those two regimes — and the dozens of finer concepts beneath them — are the vocabulary the readings use, working as a second set of categories: categories for film theory. Each concept is a doorway: open one and you see every film that embodies it, with the concrete moment that earns it. The Galaxy maps this layer visually, and the glossary defines every concept in plain language.
If you've never read Deleuze, the readings are written to be inviting, not intimidating — a way to notice how a film is thinking. If you have, they go deep.
Want the story of the collection itself — how ~1,500 films were chosen, written up, and wired together? That's on the About page. Questions or a film we're missing? Reach Adrian at gravity7.com.