Why all your cinephile friends can't stop talking about FilmStruck

But let’s say you don’t have the last six issues of “Film Comment” fanned out on your coffee table. Suppose you’re the type who adores “Casablanca” but has no idea a bloc of film critics believe Howard Hawks’s “To Have and Have Not,” made two years later, is the superior World War II film starring Humphrey Bogart as a world-weary American expatriate living in a French colony. Perhaps you don't have a dog in the Pauline Kael-Andrew Sarris fight. Mightn’t FilmStruck be a little too esoteric for you?

The guiding spirit of TCM has always been one of inclusion, and FilmStruck is as warm and inviting as a Robert Osborne introduction to your favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie. This is one of the key selling points of the site: it’s curated by film buffs, not sorted by algorithm. It’s essentially the online equivalent of asking your local video store clerk to recommend a title you would’ve never thought to rent. The experts at FilmStruck are never less than straight-up with their pitch; their plot summaries are designed to entice but never in a bait-and-switch manner. There are also videos from notable filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Philip Kaufman and Barry Jenkins, all of whom have taped introductions to their favorite movies currently offered on the site. Heed their advice, and you might discover more than a few new favorite movies of your own.

FilmStruck's home page is a tad busy with graphics, and it’s a bummer that the app still isn’t available via the PS4 or Xbox One (browser viewing requires Flash), but these are minor issues that will likely be remedied in time. The only real drawback to FilmStruck is the same one facing streaming media in general: 1,600 titles is a drop in the bucket when when you consider Scarecrow Video in Seattle holds a library of 130,000 movies. Obviously, FilmStruck refreshes its lineup every month, cycling in new titles while temporarily removing others, but it’s barely scratching the surface in terms of what’s out there.

The hope is that FilmStruck will encourage a new generation of movie lovers to seek out the fringes of cinema – the odd, the fascinatingly awful, the frustratingly out-of-print – that have trouble finding a home on streaming services. Did you love Otto Preminger’s searing political drama “Advise & Consent”? Track down his LSD-inspired counterculture satire “Skidoo,” starring Jackie Gleason and featuring music by Harry Nilsson. Knocked out by Samuel Fuller’s psych-ward masterpiece “Shock Corridor”? His 1982 drama “White Dog,” starring Paul Winfield as a dog trainer attempting to rehabilitate a stray trained to attack people of color, will blow your mind in a completely different way. And if you love John Waters’s “Hairspray,” choose any of his 1970s titles at random, and hang on for dear life.

FilmStruck’s greatest contribution to the medium may be its potential as a gateway drug to cinephilia, where discovery is a far greater high than watching “Titanic” for the zillionth time. You’ll never see it all, but you’ll want to see as much as you can.