Welcome
You're here because you wanted to know how this works. We'll try to be useful.
Watch With What is a careful AI on top of a deep film database. The combination is deliberate: the AI is fast and widely watched, but left alone it will confidently tell you about films that don't exist or get the director wrong. The database — The Movie Database, which catalogues over a million films — keeps it honest. Between the two we cover most of cinema.
Above all, we have tried to make this site honest. No padding, no invented films, no softened bridges to films that don't fit. If you have only a couple of minutes, the section that matters most is the one on the recommendation engine — that is where the discipline lives.
How the form works
The form is one combined search panel up top, three text fields below, and a row of filters. Most of the work happens in the panel.
Director or Actor I love
A single name — director (Tarantino, Lynne Ramsay) or actor (Cate Blanchett, Daniel Day-Lewis) — or someone who's substantially both (Clint Eastwood, Greta Gerwig, Sofia Coppola). Group references work too: the Coen brothers, the French New Wave, the Brat Pack expand to all their members.
Beneath the field, a Recommendation type radio asks what we should do with the name:
- Show filmography (the default) — their entire body of work split by what they've directed and what they've acted in, sorted by current popularity. No AI involved here, just data straight from TMDb. Good for "I love this person — what else have they made?"
- Similar movies (as Actor) — films featuring different actors with a similar register: comparable character types, era, the kinds of project they take on. Choose this when the actor's screen presence is what you love.
- Similar movies (as Director) — films directed by different directors with a similar sensibility: formal interests, genre territory, era. Choose this when the directorial voice is what you love.
The radio only matters when a name is given. Without one, the search runs on your mood and films-loved entries alone.
Films I love
Specific films you've enjoyed. We exclude any exact title you name, but other works by the same director or featuring the same actor may still appear. You may know There Will Be Blood but not The Master, and we would like to introduce you.
Films I've already seen
Strictly an exclusion list — these don't influence your taste profile. Use it for films you've watched but feel indifferent about.
I'm in the mood for
The strongest signal we work with. A vibe, a theme, a setting, a feeling. The clearer you can be, the better our cinephile can read you.
The dropdowns — Genre, Era, Length — are filters layered over the rest. Any is a perfectly fine choice if you're flexible.
Our cinephile is forgiving with what you give him. Type Cate Blanchett with Show filmography and you get her entire body of work, split into her acting credits and the small handful she's directed. Describe a feeling and leave the rest blank, and he reads it as a vibe and runs with it. The form is more flexible than its labels first suggest.
The recommendation engine
When you press Find My Next Watch, our cinephile generates four candidate films and then quietly puts each one through a multi-step verification before returning anything to you.
The model behind the recommendations is Claude, made by Anthropic. We have spent considerable time tuning the system prompt — the instructions Claude sees before he ever sees yours — to favour films with cultural visibility, demand specific synopses rather than vague gestures, and never invent titles.
That last claim is one we take seriously. Even a careful model occasionally misremembers a film, attributes it to the wrong director, or invents a sequel that doesn't exist. So every recommendation is checked against TMDb. If TMDb doesn't have the title — or has it with a different director than the one Claude named — it's discarded and the model is asked to try again.
Beyond hallucination prevention, the validation pipeline catches several other failure modes:
- Person exclusions. Anything you marked in Director or Actor I love is filtered server-side. In Similar modes we exclude films directed by them and films featuring them in the cast — even if the model forgets, we don't.
- Famous-films guard. When you ask for Similar (as Actor) or Similar (as Director), we look at the named person's most-watched films on TMDb and reject any candidate that matches. The presumption is that you already know the famous ones.
- Film exclusions. Anything you named in Films I love or Films I've already seen is removed.
- Synopsis quality. A recommendation without a real, specific synopsis tells us the model isn't familiar with the film. We reject it.
- Director diversity. No more than one film per director in your final four. Four Spielbergs is not a recommendation list, it's a search result.
- Genre and mood drift. When you ask for moody noir, a generic thriller without atmosphere doesn't count. We check each recommendation reads as a real match for the signal — not a "while not exactly..." softened bridge.
This is why you'll sometimes receive three films, or two, with a note saying we're being selective today. We would rather hand you one excellent film than four mediocre ones, and we make no apology for the smaller list.
A few other elements complement the engine. The Currently Trending card shows TMDb's weekly top — what the world is watching this week. The Our Library Picks shelf draws from 150 hand-selected films across decades, continents, and modes (canonical anchors mixed with curated discoveries), refreshed on each visit. The About this Director / Actor panel, opened by clicking any director's name on a result card, generates a short biography on demand and shows their selected filmography. For dual-role people — Eastwood, Greta Gerwig, John Cassavetes — the panel shows both their directing work and their acting work in separate sections. The Show Filmography mode is its own search type — pick it when you'd rather see someone's complete catalogue than have an AI surface adjacent recommendations.
What we will and won't do
There are a few editorial commitments we feel strongly enough about to put in writing.
We honour film titles in their original-language script — Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean, French, Persian, Polish. We do not anglicise away the intent of the maker.
Multi-director collaborations are credited equally. Joel and Ethan Coen are credited equally; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is credited to all four directors; Cidade de Deus credits both Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. The cover may list one name in larger type, but our system records every director on a work and treats them as equally responsible.
Quality over quantity is the rule. If your prompt has a thin corpus — and some prompts genuinely do; cosy autumnal British countryside comedy is a real example — we'd rather show you the two real matches than four where the latter two are stretches. Showing fewer recommendations than usual is honest, not a failure state.
We do not pad. We do not invent films. We do not soften a recommendation with hedge phrases like while not exactly the genre you asked for. If a film doesn't fit, it doesn't fit, and we drop it.
The wider family
Watch With What is one of three siblings already live at lifewithwhat.com. Read With What is for book recommendations; Listen With What is for music. Each member applies the same architectural principles — careful prompts, validation pipelines, honest empty states — to a different domain. The voice changes with the medium (librarian, music friend, cinephile), but the discipline does not.
Further additions are planned. The hub at lifewithwhat.com is the front door.
What we keep, and what we don't
Right now, we keep almost nothing. There are no accounts to create, no logins to remember. The form is empty when you arrive and empty again when you leave. We don't track your viewing history across sessions, and recommendations aren't retained on the server.
In a future iteration we plan to add optional accounts for visitors who'd like their preferences remembered between visits — entirely opt-in, never required. The present commitment stands either way: simple, calm, ad-free, and never sold.
The last word
Thank you for reading this far. If you've found a film you loved through Watch With What — or one we recommended that disappointed you — our cinephile would like to hear about it. The simplest way is feedback@watchwithwhat.com.