What’s new
What we’ve shipped lately — newest first.
75 vibes, thousands more films
The vibe browse pages opened up. Every one of the 75 vibes — warm hug, neon nights, slow burn, wistful longing, all of them — now reaches into a much larger pool of films than before. Tokyo Story sits under family-dynamics, Bicycle Thieves under working-class-realism, The Grapes of Wrath right next to it. Crowd-pleasers, under-the-radar finds, and deep cuts each have their place, and a new Depth filter lets you scope to whichever band you're in the mood for. Added a Top rated sort too — the highest-rated films in any vibe surface in a click.
“In the same key” got smart about smaller films
Open a film page on Perfery and scroll to the “In the same key” section — those recommendations used to lean on the wider film world's voting data, which thins out fast on under-watched gems. Look up The Grand Seduction (2014) now and the row reads Waking Ned, Welcome to the Sticks, Fisherman's Friends, Whisky Galore — the actual small-town ensemble comedies in that key, not a grab-bag of comedies tagged the same way. The further off the beaten path the film, the bigger the change.
Mix dials, reordered + small homepage polish
On the Mix page, Popularity and Rating moved to the top of the dial column — they're the first decisions you'd reach for, not buried at the bottom. The mood dials sit below as the fine-tune layer. Same controls, better priority. On the homepage, the personalization line for Letterboxd-connected users got tightened ("You've watched 1,561 films. Let's find number 1,562."), the desktop nav got a one-click way to remove an imported watchlist, and a small visual nit on the hero got cleaned up. Quiet pass.
Every film scored against every vibe
Behind-the-scenes upgrade that quietly changed the entire recommendation engine. Each of the 42,000+ films in the catalog now carries a confidence score against each of the 75 vibes — not a binary “tagged warm-hug or not” but a richer reading like “85% warm hug, 60% small-town intimacy, 30% bittersweet, 15% slow burn.” That sharper signal feeds Mix mode (where you're sculpting moods directly), the same-key strip on every film page, and the recs across the rest of the app. The change is invisible per-query but compounds across the surface — the films that should belong together end up closer; the ones that don't fall away.
Three doorways
The homepage got rebuilt around three clear doorways: describe a vibe, paste a Letterboxd list, pick favorite films. Less hunting for the entry point, more doing. A persistent five-mode nav (Vibe / List / Picks / Mix / Browse) now sits across every page so moving between modes once you have results is one click. A magnifier in the nav lets you launch a vibe search from anywhere on the site.
Mix the mood
Mix mode launched at /mix — a tunable dial canvas where you slide eleven family dials (or drill into any of the 75 sub-vibes underneath) and the film grid resorts the moment you let go. Seven presets to start from — Rainy Night, Saturday Afternoon, Brain Unlocked, Cathartic Cry, Halloween Night, Headphones On, Surprise Me — each a tuned starting point you can refine from there. Your mix lives in the URL, so a sculpted mood can be shared with a friend. The first surface in the app where you're shaping the result rather than describing it in a sentence.
Every film, fingerprinted
Open any film page on Perfery now and there's a new ★ Vibe Signature panel showing the top three vibes that define that film's feel. The Shawshank Redemption reads heartfelt-uplifting / quiet-contemplation / found-family. Mad Max: Fury Road reads kinetic-urgency / sun-bleached / operatic-emotion. Same vocabulary as the /vibe browse pages, so clicking a vibe takes you straight to films that share it. Film pages got the rest of the v2 redesign at the same time — bigger poster with a red offset shadow, magazine-style hero, and a ratings row pulling IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic side by side.
75 ways to find your next film
A new browse surface launched at /vibe — 75 hand-curated vibes you can wander through directly. Warm hug, neon nights, rain-soaked noir, wistful longing, deadpan absurdity, late-night-movie, working-class realism — each one its own page, each with its own curated film list. Organized into eleven mood families (Dark & Dreadful, Warmth & Comfort, Slow & Quiet, Beauty & Style, Craft on Display, and more) so the taxonomy doesn't sprawl. A new way in for the days you don't have a specific film in mind but know how you want to feel.
The doors are open
Today Perfery goes public — the Discord launch post is up and the site is live for anyone who wants to find their next film. Months of building, tuning, and second-guessing a recommender that earns its keep on the queries that don't fit a genre bucket. If you've landed here, welcome. The films you'd actually watch next are the ones we're trying to surface — tell us what you're in the mood for and we'll go looking.
Letterboxd lists land where they belong
Drop a courtroom-dramas list into Perfery now and it returns courtroom dramas — not the Hong Kong action film with one trial scene that used to slip through. Heist movies pull heist movies; sci-fi classics pull sci-fi classics; slow cinema, found footage, comedies of manners — same idea. The recommender pulls a topic anchor straight from your list's URL and uses it to keep recommendations in the right neighborhood. A quiet change that makes themed lists feel obvious where they used to feel accidental.
The bleakest films stay out of the warmest searches
Search for “warm hug” and the recommender used to occasionally surface The Seventh Continent or Harakiri at the bottom of the list — films that share a single keyword with the warm cluster and absolutely none of the feeling. A new tonal check keeps tonally-opposite films out of positive-emotion queries; the bleak masterpieces stay where they belong, in their own searches. While we were at it, the Picks search now correctly returns Toy Story (1995) when you type “toy story,” instead of a voice-credit person whose name happens to start with the same two words.
A site-wide redesign
Two days of pulling the whole site into a single visual language. The homepage hero got bigger and clearer. Vibe, list, and picks each have their own URL now, with a sub-nav for moving between them once you have results. The About page is completely rewritten — around perforations, the small holes that engage a projector, and the way film editors actually used to work. How It Works at the bottom of the home page moved into three plain cards on a cream band, FAQ onto its own band below. Reads like one piece of work now.
The slider learned some discipline
The niche slider leans a little deeper by default now — balanced toward the films you probably haven’t gotten to, rather than the ones everyone’s already logged. Push it further and the obvious picks step aside for the unfamiliar. Each row in list view shows a depth chip — Familiar, Under-the-radar, or Deep cut — so you can see at a glance where a title sits. The vibe input also got taller, with rotating example queries that cycle when you haven’t started typing.
Atmosphere first, not genre first
When a query names a texture — rain-soaked, sun-drenched, neon-lit, foggy, wintery — Perfery now treats the atmosphere as the subject, not decoration around a genre tag. A search for “rain-soaked noir” reaches for Blade Runner, Collateral, and Se7en instead of defaulting to 1940s classics that share the label but not the weather. Abstract queries like “warm hug” no longer pull the same handful of prestige favorites across every search.
Picks mode tuned
When you hand-pick a few films and ask for recommendations, the grid should feel like it belongs in the same conversation as those titles — not a different mood entirely. Rows land closer to the shared DNA of your seeds now. Tuning, not a new button.
Shorter URLs, magazine layout
List, vibe, and picks use shorter paths in the address bar — easier to read, easier to share. Film pages use readable titles in the URL instead of raw numbers. The home experience leaned further into the magazine shell: studio, results rail, and cream surfaces all got another round.
Welcome to the new Perfery
The cinematic home experience launched here — the dark hero, film texture, and your first recommendations — with a layout tuned for phones as well as desktop.