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Letterboxd Users Crown '12 Years a Slave' The Best Movie of 2013

It's no secret that we here at Film.com love Letterboxd. One of the neatest, most helpful, and fastest growing social media environments to come out of the last few years and almost certainly the one that's most attractive to movie lovers, Letterboxd is like Facebook for your thoughts on film, a community where people can log their viewing and interact exclusively via the exchange of criticism and commentary. We love Letterboxd so much that we've incorporated a widget into our website that runs along all of our reviews, so that you can mark your Letterboxd information without leaving the page.

But I'm not just a voluntary shill for these guys, I'm also an unrepentant addict. These days, I can't see a movie without immediately jotting down some thoughts on Letterboxd and seeing what my friends and followers have to say about it. The reason that Letterboxd was on my radar in the first place was their beautifully designed 2012 Year in Review, in which they elegantly profiled what their users made of the year in film. Now, with an exponentially larger community than ever before, they've revealed what their users thought of 2013. Comprised of cinephiles of all stripes, from filmmakers to journalists and casual movie lovers and everyone in between, the Letterboxd crowd has anointed Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave" as the best of 2013.

You absolutely owe it to yourself to take a look at the full results, which yield all sorts of interesting insight into how we processed the last 12 months.

If you're new to the service, check out my dopey account for an idea as to how it works, and then sign up! If you love movies as much as we do, you probably won't regret it.

Below is Letterboxd's official word on the matter.

The annual summary provides a glimpse into the growing Letterboxd community’s output, with over 11 million films being recorded as watched by its 86,000 members, and more than 68 million words of reviews published on the site during 2013.

Topping the highest rated films for 2013 were Steve McQueen’s likely Oscar contender 12 Years a Slave, Richard Linklater’s trilogy-concluding Before Midnight and Spike Jonze’s Golden Globe-nominated love story Her, with Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street rounding out the top five.

Based on sheer volume of activity, the most popular film was late-2012’s Django Unchained, which was omitted from the previous year’s roundup due to its very late December theatrical release date. Quentin Tarantino’s film cast a long shadow over the year, holding a top-five spot from January through May.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s haunting The Act of Killing and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner Blue is the Warmest Color topped the highest-rated documentary and foreign language categories respectively.

“This year’s results paint Letterboxd as a maturing voice among film-related networks,” said co-founder Matthew Buchanan. “The depth of content produced on the site during 2013 has provided a tremendous base from which to draw these rankings, and we trust they will encourage members and non-members alike to add a few films they might have missed to their watchlists for early 2014, ahead of the Golden Globes this coming weekend, and the Oscars in early March.” 

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