Help & Documentation

A complete guide to using moviegroupies. For quick answers, see the FAQ.

🔑 Getting started

Signing up

Enter your email on the sign-up page. We'll send you a one-time link — click it to create your account and sign in. There's no password to set.

Signing in later

Same idea: enter your email on the login page and click the link we send you. Links expire after a while for security, so request a fresh one if yours has gone stale.

Using a token instead of a link

Every sign-in email also includes a plain-text token below the link. If your email client mangles links, or you're on a device without email access, go to Enter token and paste it there instead.

🏠 Home

Signing in takes you to your home page — a quick-glance dashboard with your movie lists and groups side by side, plus a recent activity snippet showing the latest ratings and wants from your groups.

📰 Activity

The full activity feed — every rating and "want" from everyone across your groups, newest first, paginated. Follow → More from the home page's activity snippet to get here, or reach it directly from the nav.

Filter to one group at a time to see just that group's activity.

🎬 Movie lists

A movie list (or watchlist) is a named collection of movies. Every account starts with one default list, and you can create as many additional lists as you like from My Lists.

Creating & managing lists

Create — give it a name from the "New list" box on My Lists
Rename — click the ✎ icon next to a list name
Empty — removes every movie from the list but keeps the list itself
Delete — removes the list entirely (not available for your default list)

Viewing a list

Open any list to see its movies in a sortable table — click column headers (Title, Popularity, Rating, Want, Comment) to reorder. Each row links to the movie's detail page.

Tip: when adding movies from Search, they're added to whichever list is currently active. Switch the active list from the dropdown on the search page or from My Lists.

⭐ Rating & Want

Two independent ways to mark a movie:

Rating	Want
1–5 stars ★ — for movies you've already seen	1–5 hearts ♥ — how badly you want to watch it

Both are per-movie and per-user — your rating and want level are yours alone, even on a list shared with a group. You can also leave a free-text comment on any movie in a list.

Click a star or heart to set a value; click the ✕ that appears to clear it.

🔍 Searching movies

Use Search to find movies by title, and narrow results with filters:

Genre — restrict to one genre
Year or range — a single year (1994) or a range (1980-1999)
Lang — 2-letter original-language code (en, es, ja, …)
Votes — minimum vote count, useful for filtering out obscure titles

Results are sortable by title or popularity. Each row lets you rate, mark "want," and add/remove the movie from your currently active list — all without leaving the page.

📋 Curated lists

Pre-built, regularly refreshed lists you can browse and import straight into one of your own watchlists:

TMDB Upcoming — movies releasing soon
TMDB Recently Released — movies now in theaters or released in the last 30 days
TMDB Top 250 — highest-rated on TMDB
IMDb Top 250 — the classic ranking
NYT 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century — the critics' picks
NYT 100 Top Movies According to Readers — the readers' picks
AFI 100 Greatest American Films (2007) — AFI's own list
Moviegroupies Crème de la Crème — our own blend, ranked by cross-list consensus

Open Curated Lists from the nav, pick one to see its movies, then import it into any of your watchlists.

👥 Groups

Groups are how you share lists with other people — friends, family, a movie club.

Inviting people

From a group's page, enter an email address and send an invite:

If they already have a moviegroupies account, they get a link straight to the invitation
If they're new, they get an invite to sign up — once they do, they land in the group automatically

You can also generate a shareable join link — anyone with the link can join the group. It's valid for 7 days and can be used by more than one person until it expires.

Roles

Members are either admin or member. Admins can promote other members, remove members, rename the group, and delete it. Any member can leave — except the last remaining admin, who must promote someone else first.

Managing invitations

The group page lists invitations you've sent, with status (pending/accepted/declined) — you can withdraw a pending invitation or an unused join link at any time.

🔗 Sharing lists

Sharing a list with a group makes it visible to that group's members (your ratings and comments included). Toggle sharing from either:

My Lists — a list × group matrix at the bottom of the page
A group's own page, under "Shared lists" / "Unshared lists"

A list can be shared with multiple groups at once, or none.

📊 Grouplist view

Each group has a Grouplist — every movie across the group's shared lists in one table, with combined ratings and wants from everyone in the group.

Group rating & want

The Ratings and Wants columns show the group's average star rating and want level for each movie, along with how many members contributed to it (e.g. "4.2 ★ [3 ratings]"). Hover or tap a value to see the individual breakdown by member.

Your own rating and want are separate, editable right in the table — the same star/heart widgets used everywhere else — and feed into the group average.

Sorting & finding consensus picks

Click Ratings or Wants to sort by the group's average, highest first — the fastest way to surface what the group already rates highly, or what everyone's eager to watch. The order also weighs how many members rated: a movie averaging 4.8 from six ratings ranks above one with a single 5, since one rating says little. The averages shown are always the plain ones. You can also sort by title, popularity, or your own rating/want.

Filtering

Filter by genre, year, title, or by star value — the star filter matches the group's average rating (rounded), not just your own, plus an "unrated" option for movies nobody's rated yet. Combine filters to, say, find 4+ star unwatched horror movies from the '80s.

Importing

Found something good in the Grouplist that isn't on your own list yet? Use Import to pull it straight into your currently active list.

Import follows the filters you've set: filter by genre, year, title or star value first and only the matching movies come across — all of them, not just the page on screen. The same Import link is on search results and on lists other members share with you. Movies already on your list are skipped, and only the movies are copied, never anyone's ratings or comments.

⚙️ Preferences

From your Profile, you can set:

Default search language — pre-fills the language filter on Search
Minimum vote count — pre-fills the votes filter on Search
Share on join — automatically share your default list when you join a new group

👤 Account

Your profile page lets you update your username and email address (email changes require verifying the new address via a link). Every account has generous limits on list size, number of lists, and group members — plenty for personal and small-group use.

Need your account removed entirely? See the Privacy Policy for how to request deletion.

🤖 AI assistant (MCP)

moviegroupies has an MCP server, so an AI assistant like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok can search movies, rate them, manage your watchlists, and coordinate with your groups directly on your behalf — no copy-pasting between the app and your chat.

Connecting an assistant

Claude — add moviegroupies from Claude's connector directory, then sign in when prompted.
- claude.ai/directory/moviegroupies
ChatGPT — add moviegroupies from ChatGPT's official listing, then sign in when prompted.
- chatgpt.com/plugins/plugin_asdk_…
Gemini — add it as a custom MCP server in Gemini's connector settings. Use the server URL https://mcp.moviegroupies.app/mcp and OAuth for authentication. Gemini will say the server doesn't support automatic registration and ask for a client ID: enter gemini_moviegroupies_client. The client secret can be left empty; if your form insists on one, enter moviegroupies. Then sign in when prompted.
Grok — on grok.com/connectors choose New Connector → Custom. Use the server URL https://mcp.moviegroupies.app/mcp, then sign in when prompted.
Muse — give Muse these custom instructions: "Build a custom integration to the moviegroupies MCP server at https://mcp.moviegroupies.app/mcp. Auth is OAuth 2.1 with PKCE. Client ID: https://mcp.moviegroupies.app/.well-known/muse-client.json." Give Muse a few moments to build the connector. We've tested this successfully with Muse on the web.
- Muse can occasionally get a 401 (unauthorized) error right after it refreshes its access token, so also add this to its instructions: "If a call returns 401, wait a few seconds and retry it unchanged. Only a second 401 means the credential is dead."

Connecting is available on higher account tiers; your Profile page shows whether yours qualifies, and lists any assistants you've connected so you can revoke access at any time.

See the MCP tools reference for the full list of what it can do.

💡 Tips & shortcuts

Hover a movie title anywhere in the app to preview its poster, rating, and genres, with quick links to TMDB, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes. On mobile, tap instead.
Sortable tables — most list and search views let you click column headers to change sort order.
Switch lists inline — the list-selector dropdown on the Search page lets you change your active list without navigating away.

🛟 Support

Something not working, or stuck on something this page doesn't cover? Check the FAQ first, or email [email protected]. You can also find us on X and Reddit.