How it works

This dashboard runs entirely in your browser and works through 33.8 million movie ratings from MovieLens. A Python script adds details like director, cast and studio from TMDB and refreshes the data every week.

The charts use DuckDB, a database that runs inside the web page, and D3 for drawing. Pick a director, genre or actor, or click years on the chart, and every number recalculates instantly, with no server involved.

To keep it quick, the page loads a 3 MB summary first, so the charts are ready in about a second. The full 81 MB file of individual ratings then downloads in the background for the table at the bottom.

Data sources. Ratings: MovieLens (GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota), the ml-latest release covering January 1995 to July 2023. F. Maxwell Harper and Joseph A. Konstan, “The MovieLens Datasets: History and Context,” ACM TiiS 5(4), 2015. Film details, and community scores for films released after the MovieLens snapshot: TMDB, refreshed weekly. TMDB scores are out of 10 and are never mixed into the MovieLens averages. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.