Find a Random Film

Picking a film without the scrolling

Deciding what to watch takes longer than it should, mostly because every service presents an endless grid and no way to commit. This selector narrows things to one title: search a keyword, and it picks a film at random from the matches and shows you what it landed on.

How to use it

• Enter a keyword — a genre, an actor, a word from a title — and search.
• Leave the box empty and it fetches a genuinely random English word to search on, which is a blunter instrument but turns up films you would never have looked for.
• The chosen film is shown with its year, genre, cast and plot, and the rest of the matches are listed underneath if the pick does not appeal.

Where the data comes from

Titles and details come from the Open Movie Database, a community-maintained API of film metadata drawn from IMDb. Only feature films are searched, and the random pick is made from the first page of results the API returns rather than its whole catalogue — so a broad keyword gives a random film from ten, not from thousands.

omdbapi.com