The movie tracker for people who take film seriously

You watch movies differently

There's a particular kind of movie watcher who remembers not just what they saw, but when they saw it, who they saw it with, and how they felt about it afterward. Who builds watchlists the way other people build playlists. Who has actual opinions about the Tomatometer versus the Audience Score. Who checks whether there's source material before a film comes out.

Most movie tracker apps weren't built for you. They're built for the casual viewer who wants to know what's trending on Netflix this weekend and doesn't think much beyond that. Or they're built so deep around social features — reviews, followers, public lists — that tracking your own watch history becomes secondary to performing it for an audience.

Limelight is a personal movie tracker. It's built for the cinephile who wants to track, discover, and organize without an audience and without ads. Your lists are private. Your film log is yours. The experience is clean because we took everything out that wasn't useful and kept everything that was.

It covers movies and TV shows equally — not movies first with TV as an afterthought. Your Watchlist and Seen List hold both. Every feature works the same way for a 1974 Bergman film as it does for a prestige HBO series.

Your watching history, properly kept

The Seen List is the most important feature in Limelight for serious movie fans — and the one that takes the longest to fully appreciate. Every film you mark as seen gets logged there, permanently and cleanly. Not buried in a social feed. Not mixed with ratings you wrote for other people. Just your list, searchable, always there.

There's something genuinely satisfying about a complete record — a real film log, not just a mental tally. Knowing you've worked through all of Kubrick's major films. Knowing you watched five Agnès Varda features in a single month. Knowing you'd seen "The Godfather" four times before you finally convinced yourself to sit down with Part II. Your Seen List is a personal movie diary that holds all of that without requiring you to do anything with it.

Your Watchlist grows faster than you can work through it — that's the right problem to have. Every time a friend recommends something, every time a trailer catches your eye, every time a critic mentions a film you haven't seen, it goes in the Watchlist. Limelight keeps it organized so the list doesn't become a graveyard of half-remembered titles you can never find again.

Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Metacritic, and TMDB — one screen

Serious film viewers don't trust a single rating. They know how to read the gap between an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.4 on IMDB and understand what it probably says about the film and its audience.

Limelight+ shows Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Metacritic, and TMDB scores on every title — consolidated on the details page, without opening four different apps. Each number carries different information, and knowing the differences makes all of them more useful.

Limelight doesn't collapse these into a single "Limelight Score." That would throw away all the texture. You get all four, you apply the context you already have, and you make a better-informed decision about whether a film is worth your time.

Build the lists you actually want to build

The best way to engage seriously with film is through curation. Making lists forces you to commit to opinions, notice patterns, and build a personal canon that reflects how you actually feel about what you've watched — not how you're supposed to feel.

Limelight+ lets you create unlimited custom lists. No templates, no categories we've pre-defined for you. Just a name and a collection of titles — any mix of movies and TV shows, in any order you want.

Film enthusiasts tend to build two kinds of lists. The obsessive collecting kind: every film that won the Palme d'Or, the complete Criterion Collection, every Tarkovsky feature in chronological order, every film with a score by Ennio Morricone. And the practical kind: "Under 90 Minutes," "Watch With My Partner," "Already Own on Blu-ray," "Films I Recommended and Need to Follow Up On." Both matter. Limelight handles both without judgment.

Custom lists are private by default. There's no audience, no performance, no context beyond your own. They exist purely as organizational tools for how you watch.

Finally know what you're looking at

There's a specific frustration that serious movie fans know well: you see a frame somewhere — on social media, in a video essay, on someone's phone, on a poster in the background of a photograph — and you can't quite place it. The cinematography is familiar. The actor is someone you recognize from something. You've definitely seen this before. It's going to bother you until you figure it out.

SceneSnap solves that. Take a photo of your screen, upload a screenshot from your camera roll, and Limelight's AI identifies the movie or TV show — the title, the scene, and the actors in frame. It works on stills, on video clips playing on a screen, on anything you can point a camera at.

When SceneSnap finds a match, it opens the title's details page in Limelight. From there you can add it to your watchlist, check where it's streaming right now, read the full cast and crew, and get recommendations for similar films. One photo closes the loop on a question that used to require a half-hour of searching.

For movie fans who spend time in video essays, film discussion communities, or the general flow of film-adjacent content online, SceneSnap is the feature that catches moments that would otherwise slip away.

Read it first

For many film enthusiasts, the most important decision before watching an adaptation isn't which version to watch or which director's cut to seek out — it's whether to read the source material first. The experience of reading McCarthy's No Country for Old Men before the Coen Brothers' film is genuinely different from reading it after. Neither is wrong. But making that choice requires knowing the source material exists in the first place.

Limelight surfaces book adaptations automatically. On the details page for any film or TV show adapted from a book, you'll see the source text — novel, novella, short story, play, or non-fiction — with a direct link to find it. This works for the obvious literary adaptations and for less well-known cases equally. You're not going to miss that a film you're considering is based on a 1950s Japanese novel because you forgot to research it.

The home feed in Limelight also highlights upcoming adaptations currently in production or recently released, so you can get ahead of the films before they come out. The read-it-first decision only works if you have enough lead time to actually do it.

Stop searching for where it streams

Even the most dedicated film viewer loses time to the same question: where does this actually stream right now? Streaming rights move constantly. Films that were on Netflix six months ago are on Prime today, only available to rent, or temporarily gone entirely. Keeping up mentally is impossible when you have a watchlist of any real depth.

Limelight shows streaming availability for any title in one place — which platforms it's currently on, whether it's available to rent or purchase, and what the options are across Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Paramount+, Peacock, and Apple TV+. Rental and purchase options on Apple TV, Amazon, and Vudu are included as well.

This information is on every title's details page, instantly, without switching apps. For movie enthusiasts with long watchlists who actively work through them across multiple platforms, knowing at a glance where something is available changes how you plan what to watch — and how quickly you actually start watching instead of searching.

Different tools for different jobs

Letterboxd is built around community. It's excellent for what it does: logging films, writing reviews, sharing lists, following critics and other fans, engaging with the social side of film culture. If that matters to you, Letterboxd is genuinely worth using. But it doesn't support TV shows (announced in 2024, still not launched), doesn't show where to stream anything, and has no equivalent to SceneSnap.

Trakt is the right tool if you run a media center like Plex or Kodi and want automatic scrobbling. It's powerful, but the setup is technical and the interface reflects it. It's built for power users who want deep integrations, not a clean daily-use discovery app.

TV Time skews heavily toward social features and episode-by-episode TV tracking. The free tier is ad-supported. Discovery and streaming availability aren't its focus.

JustWatch tells you where to stream something, but it doesn't help you decide what to watch, track what you've seen, or build any kind of watch history.

Limelight sits at a different point in the stack. It's the personal movie tracker built for cinephiles who want discovery, tracking, streaming availability, and multi-source ratings in one clean, ad-free app — without social pressure, technical complexity, or ads. Some dedicated film fans use Limelight alongside Letterboxd: Limelight for the practical side, Letterboxd for the social layer. That's a reasonable setup.

Frequently asked questions