Philaflava.com ::

They decided to shut down the msg board(s), as some of you might have noticed. This is a great shame IMO because it was an easy resource for info and convo about old films and new more obscure films that aren't really discussed anywhere else on the internet. I also used it to look up films where I missed something or didn't understand a plotpoint - usually someone else would have the same problem.

Of course the boards for new, highly promoted films were full of shit and impossible to moderate. I guess the boards were shut down because Amazon wants visitors to have a nice, sanitized and clean, corporate-approved experience when they log on. But I'm sure it can't be good for their traffic.

Are there any alternatives out there or has everything moved to social media by now?

IMDb was only ever useful for tracking various cast and crew. The actual forum was infested by lonely trolls looking for attention, and it's reviews were largely shitty and skewered by recency bias.

You might want to check out https://www.cult-labs.com/forums/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; , even that place isn't all that, though.

I use IMDB all the time but tbh rarely ever looked at their message boards. Pretty much everything you mentioned I was able to get via the posted reviews or from linked external reviews. The latter has actually been incredibly useful for me, it led me to some very niche-specific review sites that are often more informative than fan comments.

Removing message boards and comment sections is pretty common now though so this is not very surprising. I imagine aside from sparing the thankless efforts of moderation it also saves on hosting and management resources.

agreed with drizzle and Spartan. cast. crew. filmography. related films. that's your foundation right there. I feel like removing the ability to comment is a gentle encouragement to people to form better opinions so they can voice them to real people as opposed to ranking lord of the rings 10/10 #6 all time movie and spew garbage about nonsense and just live in this garbagey world

Good point about external reviews. I have used that a lot and noticed that it was usually the same few sites that reviewed films I was potentially interested in. Now I know more or less which sites to trust in terms of rating movies like I would.

It's really isn't true that the boards were always awful. For instance I recently saw the full cut of Das Boot and found a lot of interesting commentary from a uboat veteran about sublife. There was also the boards for cult classic Rituals (1976) where people who worked on the film did AMA. Stuff like this you can find elsewhere through Google I guess, but I really enjoyed having a global aggregated moviebrain where things were easy to find.