NowMovies

How NowMovies works

The home page is black, with a yellow tag in the logo and a grey genre bar beneath it. A framed still from a featured movie sits beside the heading, with a line marked Storyline that gives the featured film's premise. Below come six sections, each under a yellow tab: the top rated, three pairs of years from the newest back, family, and films made for television. Each section shows six data sheets, two across.

Pressing a sheet opens the movie page, which repeats the five lines and adds the full storyline, the cast in order and the remaining facts of production. Beside the Watch now button is a country selector; choose a country, press the button, and the movie opens on JustWatch, which lists the subscription, rental, purchase and free services that carry it there. NowMovies is a guide, and the watching happens on those official services.

Four routes lead to a movie, set out in Finding a movie: the genre bar, the search field, the lists page and the alphabetical index. The search reads directors and stars as well as titles. The list feature is called My Sheets; it keeps movies to watch in the browser on the device in use, and the My Sheets page explains how to add to it and how to save it as a file.

How to read a data sheet

Reading a data sheet takes the five lines in turn, and each repays a moment's thought. Run time is the most practical. The movies here range from seventy-eight minutes to 134, and most fall between ninety and a hundred and ten, the natural length of a comedy or a family film. A glance at this line tells a parent whether a film will end before bedtime and tells anyone else whether there is time for a second.

Rating is the public score out of ten, drawn from the votes of thousands of viewers. It is best read in bands. Anything from 7.0 upward is widely admired; the sixes are solid entertainment with loyal audiences; and the fives include many family comedies that children adore and critics forgave. The yellow figure on each sheet is a first impression, and the genres beside it say whether the film is the kind the visitor wants tonight.

Genres appear three at most, in the order the database gives them. Comedy and drama together usually signal a film with laughter and some weight; family and fantasy together promise something for younger viewers; romance beside drama suggests handkerchiefs. Director and stars close the sheet. A visitor who enjoyed one film by a director can press the name on the movie page and see what else that person made in these six years, and the same is true of every actor listed.

Comedy

One hundred and one movies are comedies, and the comedy guide begins in the kitchen. Chef, written and directed by Jon Favreau, who also plays the lead, follows a restaurant cook in Los Angeles who quarrels with his employer, buys an old food truck in Miami and drives it home across the South with his young son and his best friend, selling pressed sandwiches at every stop. It is a film about work done with love, about a father learning to pay attention, and about how good food looks when it is filmed by someone who cares. Its sheet reads 114 minutes and a rating of 7.1.

Two British films approach food from another angle. In The Trip, the actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing versions of themselves, tour the restaurants of northern England for a newspaper, and spend most of each meal competing to do the best impression of a famous voice. The Trip to Italy repeats the journey from Piedmont to Capri. Both are largely improvised, both are very funny, and both have a streak of melancholy about friendship in middle age.

Family comedy is well supplied. Daddy's Home sets a gentle stepfather against the children's glamorous father. The three films of Diary of a Wimpy Kid follow Greg Heffley through middle school with drawings from the books scribbled over the screen; their young lead, Zachary Gordon, has more sheets here than any other actor. Ramona and Beezus brings a much-loved pair of sisters from the page, and Mr. Popper's Penguins fills a Manhattan apartment with snow.

Comedy for grown-ups took a thoughtful turn in these years. Enough Said stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a masseuse who begins to see a kind, funny man and then discovers that her new client is his former wife. Win Win gives Paul Giamatti the role of a small-town lawyer and wrestling coach who takes in a teenage runaway with a gift for the sport. The Rewrite sends a faded screenwriter, played by Hugh Grant, to teach at a college in upstate New York, and Morning Glory puts a young producer in charge of a breakfast programme and two warring presenters.

Drama

One hundred and nine movies are dramas, the longest list in the guide, and the drama guide opens with three studies of ambition. The Social Network, directed by David Fincher from a script by Aaron Sorkin, tells of the founding of a website in a university dormitory and of the friendships it cost; its dialogue moves at the speed of thought, and it won three Academy Awards. Moneyball, also co-written by Sorkin, follows a baseball manager with a small budget who rebuilds his team by statistics; at 134 minutes it is the longest film on NowMovies. Steve Jobs completes the trio with three backstage acts before three product launches.

A second group concerns people beginning again later in life. In 5 Flights Up, a couple who have shared a Brooklyn walk-up for forty years, played by Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman, spend one weekend deciding whether to sell it. Learning to Drive pairs a Manhattan writer whose marriage has ended with a patient instructor from India. Another Year, directed by Mike Leigh, visits a contented London couple through four seasons as lonelier friends come and go from their kitchen table, and Le Week-End sends a pair of teachers from Birmingham to Paris for an anniversary.

Small towns and hard work give the list its backbone. McFarland, USA, rated 7.5, stars Kevin Costner as a coach who arrives at a school in California's farm country in 1987 and notices that the boys who rise before dawn to pick crops can run for miles; the cross-country team he builds changes the town. A Better Life follows a gardener in Los Angeles and his teenage son through a few difficult days. Promised Land sends two company representatives to a farming community with an offer, and Wish I Was Here finds a struggling actor teaching his own children at home.

The drama list also holds the classics, filmed again for a new decade: Great Expectations, with Helena Bonham Carter as the jilted Miss Havisham; Wuthering Heights, shot on the Yorkshire moors in wind and rain; and Far from the Madding Crowd, in which Carey Mulligan plays a farmer courted by three very different men.

Romance

Eighty-four movies are love stories, and the romance guide starts with the highest-rated film in the whole guide. Flipped, directed by Rob Reiner and rated 8.0, is set in an American suburb around 1960. Juli decides at seven that the new boy across the street is the one for her; Bryce spends six years avoiding her. The film tells every chapter twice, first in his voice and then in hers, and by the end the audience understands both of them better than they understand each other. A sycamore tree, a clutch of eggs and a basket lunch carry more feeling than most films manage with a wedding.

Time is also the subject of One Day, which visits Emma and Dexter on the fifteenth of July for twenty years, and of The Last Five Years, a musical in which one partner tells the story of a marriage forward and the other tells it in reverse. In Your Eyes links two strangers on opposite sides of a continent who find they can see through each other's eyes.

The decade loved a romantic novel. The Longest Ride, rated 7.6, crosses the story of a rodeo rider and an art student with the letters of a couple who met in the 1940s. The Best of Me reunites two school sweethearts after twenty years, and Water for Elephants sets a veterinary student, a star performer and an elephant named Rosie aboard a circus train in 1931. All three are told with handsome photography and complete sincerity.

Lighter choices fill the rest of the list. What If asks whether two people who are perfectly matched as friends should risk being more. Man Up follows a woman who is mistaken for someone's blind date at a London station and decides to go along with it. Austenland sends an admirer of a famous novelist to a country-house holiday where every guest plays a part. Monte Carlo, When in Rome, To Rome with Love and Eat Pray Love offer travel with their romance, and Life As We Know It and The Decoy Bride offer comedy.

Family

Sixty-one movies suit all ages, and the family guide begins with a bear. Paddington, released in 2014, brings a young bear from the forests of Peru to a London railway station, where the Brown family find him sitting on his suitcase with a label round his neck. He floods their bathroom, charms their neighbours and teaches a cautious father to be brave. The film is witty, beautifully designed and kind in every frame, and it has already joined the short list of family films that adults seek out for themselves.

Fairy tales were told straight and told anew. Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh in 2015, trusts the old story and gives it a heroine whose courage is her kindness and a ball gown that seems to be made of sky. The Odd Life of Timothy Green is a modern fable about a couple who wish for a child and find a boy in their garden with leaves on his ankles. Gulliver's Travels and Tooth Fairy play old tales for laughs.

The Muppets reunited a famous troupe of puppets after years apart. A devoted fan, his brother and his brother's girlfriend help the frog round up the old gang to save their theatre, and the film is both a celebration and a gentle joke about celebrations. Animals lead several others: the dolphin with the new tail in Dolphin Tale and its sequel, the dog who guards a colony of tiny penguins in the Australian film Oddball, the Great Dane of Marmaduke and the lapdogs of two Beverly Hills comedies.

For children who like a real-world adventure, Paper Planes follows an Australian boy to the world junior paper-aeroplane championships in Japan, Return to Nim's Island defends a tropical island, and Horrid Henry: The Movie lets a British book character loose on his school. The Great Gilly Hopkins is a touching story of a girl who has moved from home to home and at last meets a foster mother she is unable to outwit.

Fantasy and adventure

Thirty-four movies travel beyond the everyday, and the fantasy guide gives first place to Hugo. Martin Scorsese's film is set in a Paris railway station in 1931, where an orphan lives inside the walls and keeps the clocks running. He is trying to repair a mechanical man left by his father, and the search for its missing part leads him to a toy-seller with a secret: the old man was once one of the first great makers of films. The story becomes a tribute to the birth of cinema, it won five Academy Awards, and its opening flight through the station is among the finest uses of the camera in the decade.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, directed by and starring Ben Stiller, concerns a quiet man who manages photographic negatives at a famous magazine and escapes into daydreams. When a picture goes missing, he sets out to find the photographer and finds himself on a ship off Greenland, a longboard in Iceland and a mountainside in Asia. It is a film that makes viewers want to book a ticket somewhere.

Family adventure is represented by Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, in which a teenager and his stepfather follow a coded message to an island of tiny elephants and giant bees; by Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the last of a trilogy, set in London; and by The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a voyage to the edge of the world. Gentler fantasies, such as the telepathic romance and the garden child already described, complete the list.

Biography and true stories

Twenty-five movies are drawn from real lives, and the true stories guide sorts them by field. Business supplies the website founder, the two portraits of a computer pioneer, in Steve Jobs and Jobs, and Joy, in which Jennifer Lawrence plays a mother who invents a new kind of mop and sells it herself on a shopping channel. Sport supplies the baseball manager, the cross-country coach, the agent of Million Dollar Arm who looks for pitchers among Indian cricketers, the football films When the Game Stands Tall and My All American, and the gymnast of Full Out.

The finest of them is Temple Grandin, rated 7.9 and made for television. Claire Danes plays a young woman with autism who thinks in pictures, studies the behaviour of cattle on her aunt's ranch and goes on to redesign livestock handling across a continent. The film shows the world as she sees it, with diagrams unfolding in the air, and honours the mother and the teacher who believed in her.

The arts have their sheets as well. Big Eyes tells of a painter whose work sold by the million under her husband's signature. Hitchcock watches a famous director gamble on an unusual project in 1959, The Lady in the Van recalls the woman who parked on a playwright's drive for fifteen years, and Effie Gray the young wife of a Victorian critic. Magic Beyond Words: The J.K. Rowling Story and An Adventure in Space and Time, about the birth of a science-fiction serial, were both made for television.

Courage and rescue complete the list: The 33, about the Chilean miners brought to the surface in 2010; Big Miracle, about three whales trapped by ice off Alaska; Spare Parts, about four schoolboys and an underwater robot; One Chance, about a shop assistant who sang opera on a talent show; and Marvellous, about a man who simply decided to be happy.

Music and dance

Twenty-five movies sing or dance, and the music guide hears three kinds. The first is choral. Pitch Perfect 2 sends a college singing group to a world championship; Joyful Noise gives Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton rival ideas about how a church choir should win a national contest; and One Chance ends on a single aria.

The second kind is dance. Step Up 3D and Step Up All In continue a series about street crews, and the British answer comes in StreetDance 3D, which unites hip-hop dancers with a ballet school, and its sequel. Footloose, remade in 2011, brings a newcomer to a town that has banned dancing, and Cuban Fury returns a middle-aged office worker to the salsa floor he left as a boy.

The third belongs to young viewers. Lemonade Mouth, rated 7.4, begins in detention, where five pupils who have little in common discover they can play together, and follows their band through a school year. Teen Beach Movie and its sequel drop two modern surfers into a musical of the 1960s, and Starstruck, Radio Rebel and Rags each give a shy performer a stage. Ricki and the Flash hands Meryl Streep a guitar, and Walking on Sunshine sets a holiday romance to the hits of the 1980s.

Christmas

Twenty-three movies belong to December, and the Christmas guide admits that this is a guide with a soft spot for the season. Most of these films were made for television in the years when a new holiday romance appeared every week of the winter. Royalty is a favourite theme: in A Royal Christmas a seamstress from Philadelphia learns that her fiancé is a prince, and in Crown for Christmas a hotel maid becomes governess to a king's daughter.

Small towns provide the other great setting. Christmas Under Wraps posts an ambitious young doctor to a town in Alaska with a secret; The Christmas Secret, Christmas Land and Northpole: Open for Christmas each restore a tired adult's sense of wonder. A Christmas Melody, 12 Gifts of Christmas, Merry Kissmas and A Bride for Christmas are romances wrapped in snow.

Family comedies round out the list. Love the Coopers gathers four generations for a dinner that every member dreads. Pete's Christmas makes a forgotten middle child live the day again until he gets it right. Jingle All the Way 2, Santa Paws 2: The Santa Pups and Beethoven's Christmas Adventure are for the youngest, and Dear Santa begins with a letter that blows out of a mail van.

Food on film

Cooking had a remarkable run in these six years, and several sheets could double as menus. Besides the food truck and the two restaurant tours there is The Hundred-Foot Journey, rated 7.3, in which an Indian family opens a restaurant in a French village directly across the road from an establishment with a famous star. The rivalry between the two kitchens, one run by a proud father and the other by an exacting widow played by Helen Mirren, turns slowly into respect, and a young cook with an extraordinary palate crosses the hundred feet between them.

Love's Kitchen sets a London chef to revive a country pub, and the cookery of the American South perfumes more than one of the television romances. Even the bear from Peru is a cook of sorts, devoted to marmalade made to a family recipe. These films share a belief that feeding people well is a form of affection, which may be why they are so pleasant to watch at the end of a long day.

Sport and teams

Sport runs through the catalogue under several genre labels. The baseball manager and the cross-country coach have been described; they are joined by Trouble with the Curve, in which an ageing talent scout, played by Clint Eastwood, takes a last trip through the minor leagues with his daughter; by Draft Day, which packs the trading of young football players into a single day of telephone calls; and by Touchback, about a former player given the chance to replay one game.

Team spirit of other kinds fills the family and music lists: singing groups, dance crews, a school band, a robotics club. Life of a King is the true story of a man who starts a chess club for teenagers in Washington, and The Kings of Summer follows three friends who build a house in the woods. The message of all of them is the same and is worth hearing often: people do more together than apart.

Places on the sheets

The six years were good for travel on screen. Paris appears in the station of 1931 and in the anniversary weekend. Rome hosts two comedies, Monte Carlo a third, and the Italian coast a restaurant tour. India welcomes the retirees of Jaipur and sends a family to France. Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas pass beneath the daydreamer's feet, and Japan hosts a contest for paper aeroplanes.

Closer to home, the American small town is everywhere: in the farm country of California, in North Carolina, in Florida beside an aquarium, in Alaska under snow. London is seen from a railway station, from a playwright's window in Camden and from the gates of a palace. The country line on each movie page shows where a film was made, and the search field will find a place named in a storyline.

From page to screen

Many sheets began as books. The classics are obvious, three great nineteenth-century novels filmed in the space of four years. Children's literature supplied the bear, the wimpy kid, the two sisters of Klickitat Street, the horrid boy, the girl on the island and the tortoise courtship. Popular fiction supplied the rodeo romance, the circus train, the twenty-year friendship and the reunion of school sweethearts.

Memoir and journalism lie behind the true stories: a book about baseball economics, a magazine article about four schoolboys and a robot, a diary of a year spent travelling alone. A household of readers can make a game of it, reading the book first or afterwards and comparing. The storyline on each movie page usually mentions the source.

Love and life after fifty

One of the pleasant surprises of the period is how many films concern people past middle age, and how lively they are. The Brooklyn couple weighing a move, the Birmingham teachers in Paris, the retirees in Jaipur and the London hosts at their kitchen table have been mentioned. And So It Goes gives Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton a late courtship across a shared porch, and Darling Companion sends a group of friends into the Rocky Mountains in search of a lost dog.

These films are comedies of manners more than of incident, and they depend on actors with decades of craft. They also make excellent shared viewing for grown children and their parents. The data sheets identify them quickly, since the stars' names are often the reason to watch.

For younger viewers

Children and teenagers are well served, and a parent can use the sheets to choose by age. For the youngest, the bear, the penguins, the puppets and the dolphin are sure choices, each under two hours and most well under. From about eight, the school comedies and the fairy tales suit, together with the adventure on the mysterious island.

For ten and upward, the cable-channel musicals and comedies come into their own, and for teenagers the romances drawn from popular novels, the school band and the summer at the water park. The genres line on each sheet is the quickest guide to tone, and the storyline on the movie page settles any doubt.

Good pairings

Some sheets belong side by side. The two portraits of the computer pioneer, one conventional and one in three acts, show how differently a life can be told. The two restaurant tours make an evening of laughter and scenery. The fairy tale of 2015 pairs well with the modern fable of the garden child, and the French village restaurant with the food truck.

For contrast, try the Paris station of 1931 followed by the website of 2003: two stories about young inventors, eighty years apart, each alone in a crowd. Or the coach in the farm country followed by the manager in the baseball office, two views of what a team needs. My Sheets will hold either pair until the evening is free.

Sheets for the seasons

The catalogue follows the year comfortably. Winter has twenty-three films of its own. February suits the romances, of which there are more than eighty. Spring is the season of the gardens, the country walks and the wedding comedies. Summer has the water park, the beach musicals, the house in the woods and the road trip in a food truck, and autumn the return to school and the sports films.

A visitor who enjoys ritual might keep one sheet for each month in My Sheets and return to it yearly. Because the list can be saved as a file, it can be carried from one device to the next when a computer is replaced.

People at work

A good number of sheets describe people doing a job, and doing it with care. The breakfast-television producer rises at half past one in the morning. The Brooklyn painter has worked in the same room for forty years. A college professor in Liberal Arts returns to his old campus and remembers why he loved to read. In Extraordinary Measures, a father leaves a secure post to fund research into his children's illness, and in The Giant Mechanical Man a street performer and a zoo attendant recognise something in each other.

Work is also where many of the romances begin: on a film set in the Alps, in a hotel kitchen, at a magazine, on a ranch. The period was interested in vocation, in the idea that the right work is part of a good life, and several of its most popular films end with a character opening a small business of their own.

Friendship on the sheets

Friendship carries as many of these films as romance. Two actors tour restaurants and tease each other about who is the better mimic. Three boys build a house in a clearing. A chef's oldest colleague gives up a promotion to drive across the country with him. A bear makes a friend of an antique dealer, a shy boy at a water park is adopted by its easy-going manager, and five strangers in a detention room become a band.

Films about friends tend to be good company in themselves, and they suit a group. A visitor choosing for several people might look for the word Comedy beside Drama on a sheet, which in these years often signals exactly this kind of story.

How the films look and sound

The six years saw the cinema complete its move from photographic film to digital cameras, and the change is visible. Colours are clean and bright, night scenes are clearer, and effects blend with real settings so smoothly that a bear can ride an escalator or a dolphin wear a new tail and seem entirely present. A few directors used three-dimensional photography with real artistry, above all in the Paris station, where snow, steam and clockwork seem to reach into the room.

Music changed as well. Songs written for a film could travel the world within days, and several of these soundtracks were as successful as the films themselves. Scores grew lighter, with small ensembles and solo instruments in place of the full orchestra. The telephones, laptops and social networks on screen are the ones still in daily use, which keeps these films feeling close.

Where to begin

For a first visit, three sheets give the range of the guide: the bear at the railway station for a family evening, the food truck for an evening among friends, and the suburban romance told twice for a quiet evening of feeling. A second visit might take the Paris station, the cross-country team and the weekend of restaurants.

After that the lists and the genre bar take over. The top rated section at the head of the home page is always a safe starting point, and the pairs of years below it let a visitor return to a particular season of cinema-going. Whichever route is chosen, the five lines on each sheet do the first part of the choosing, and the Watch now button does the rest.

Why five lines are enough

The original idea of the data sheet is older than the web. Newspaper listings, video-shop cases and television guides all settled on the same handful of facts, because long experience showed that those were the facts people used. A title and a year identify the film. A length and a score say whether it suits the evening. Genres set expectations, and the names of a director and three actors do the persuading.

Everything else can wait for the movie page. By keeping each sheet to five lines and giving every sheet the same shape, the guide lets the eye run down a section and compare as it goes. It is a modest design, and it has the virtue of leaving the decision where it belongs, with the person holding the remote.

Sharing a sheet

Because a sheet is so compact, it travels well. A visitor can describe a film to a friend in the five facts it shows, and the friend will know at once whether it appeals. Households often settle a choice by reading two sheets aloud and voting. Film clubs and classrooms can do the same with a whole section, and the year groups make it simple to build a short season, six films from six years, one for each week of a half term.

The list page helps here as well. A saved file of sheets can be sent to someone else, opened on their own device and used as a ready-made set of suggestions. It is a small feature, and it turns a private list into a recommendation, which is the oldest and best way that good films have always found their audiences. A sheet passed from one viewer to another carries the same five facts and one thing more, the knowledge that somebody enjoyed it.

British films

Thirty-one movies come from the United Kingdom, and the British guide finds them in fine form. Besides the bear from Peru, the two tours of restaurants and the three literary classics, the list holds The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which a group of English retirees continue their adventures in Jaipur; A Royal Night Out, which imagines two princesses slipping out of the palace to join the crowds on the night peace was declared in 1945; and Chalet Girl, about a former skateboard champion who takes a job in the Alps.

British television contributed two small gems. Roald Dahl's Esio Trot stars Dustin Hoffman as a shy retired bachelor who wins the heart of his neighbour, played by Judi Dench, with the help of a great many tortoises. Marvellous tells the true story of a man who became a circus clown, a university greeter and the kit man of a football club through sheer good cheer. Good Vibrations recalls a record shop in Belfast and the music it launched, and The Decoy Bride hides a film star's wedding on a Scottish island.

Made for television

Forty-three movies were first shown on television, and the television guide treats them with respect. The years from 2010 to 2015 were a good period for the form. Cable channels for young viewers produced a steady run of musicals and comedies, among them Zapped, in which a girl's telephone gains the power to control the boys at her new school, Cloud 9, set among snowboarders, Frenemies, How to Build a Better Boy and Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure.

Family channels made warm dramas and romances for the whole household: A Country Wedding, Flying Home, Remember Sunday, about a man whose memory resets each morning, and Sundays at Tiffany's. The acclaimed portrait of the scientist with autism, the story of how a long-running British serial began and the film about the author of a famous series of children's books show the more ambitious side of the small screen.

Television films are shorter than cinema releases, usually under an hour and a half, and they are made to be watched at home in company. On a data sheet they can be spotted by the label in the genres line, and the list gathers all forty-three.

Three pairs of years

The six years are filed in three pairs. The first, 2010 and 2011, holds sixty-four movies and has a claim to be the strongest: it includes the website drama, the Paris station, the baseball story, the puppets' return and the suburban romance that leads the ratings. The second, 2012 and 2013, holds forty-six, among them the daydreamer's travels, the summer at the water park in The Way Way Back and a new version of a Dickens novel.

The third, 2014 and 2015, is the fullest with seventy-five movies. By then streaming services had begun to commission their own films and television channels were producing more than ever, so the pair of years is rich in romances, family adventures and Christmas stories, together with the bear, the chef, the fairy tale and the cross-country team.

Top rated

Twenty-three movies are rated 7.0 or higher by at least three hundred voters, and the top rated guide lists them. The suburban romance leads at 8.0 and the scientist's story follows at 7.9. Three romances and a sports drama stand between 7.4 and 7.6, and the school band joins them. The admired dramas of ambition sit a little lower, at 7.3 and 7.4, which says something about how ratings work: voters are generous to films that move them.

The list is short because the threshold is strict, and there is a great deal of pleasure to be had below it. A sheet that reads 6.6 beside a favourite actor's name is usually a safe evening.

Directors and stars

The last two lines of the sheet reward attention. Diane Keaton appears on five sheets, more than any other adult star, as a television presenter, a singer next door, a painter in Brooklyn, a grandmother at Christmas and a dog's devoted owner in Darling Companion. Amy Adams plays a painter, a baseball scout's daughter and a puppet's best friend. Owen Wilson, Josh Duhamel and Kristen Bell each lead three films, and Bailee Madison three for younger viewers.

Among directors, Rob Reiner made the top-rated romance and the late-life comedy And So It Goes. Roger Michell made the breakfast-television comedy and the Paris weekend. Patricia Riggen directed the miners' rescue and a musical for young viewers, and Alex Zamm, a specialist in family films for television, has six sheets. David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Mike Leigh and Kenneth Branagh each contribute one film of real distinction.

What the six years were like

The cinema of 2010 to 2015 stood between two periods. The romantic comedy and the mid-budget drama, staples of the previous decade, were still being made for cinemas, though less often each year. Family films grew more polished, and British studios in particular found a worldwide audience for stories told with wit. Meanwhile television and the new streaming services were learning to make films of their own, and by 2015 a great many viewers saw a new release first on a sofa.

The stories reflect the change. Characters start blogs, sell inventions on shopping channels, go viral and fall in love by text message. A cook loses his job because of an argument that spreads online and wins it back by posting pictures of sandwiches. A founder is sued by the friends he left behind. The telephones in these films are recognisably the ones still in use, which makes the period feel like the recent past and the films like contemporaries.

Using the sheets to plan

Because every sheet shows the same five facts, comparing two films takes seconds. A family choosing between a ninety-five-minute comedy rated 6.4 and a hundred-and-twenty-minute adventure rated 7.2 can see the trade at once. A visitor who wants something under an hour and a half can scan the first line of each sheet in a section and stop at the first that fits.

My Sheets makes the plan last. Add the candidates for the week, and on the evening itself the list page shows them together. Since the list lives in the browser on one device, a shared tablet or the family computer keeps everyone's suggestions in one place.

The movie page

Behind each sheet is a fuller page. It opens with the poster, the title and the year, and repeats the five lines in larger type. The storyline follows, a paragraph that sets up the situation and stops before the outcome. The cast is then listed in order of billing, each name leading to that person's other sheets, and the director likewise. Further down are the release date, the country and the studio. The country selector and the Watch now button stand near the top of the page, and a row of related movies from the same list closes it.

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