TL;DR: I created a movie review website oriented towards parents:
None of my kids have phones, and we generally limit their screen usage. YouTube is only publicly shown when I’m watching, and the older ones occasionally ask to “do their Duolingo and check their chat” using one of the laptops but are not generally free on their own to discover all the brain rot media the internet has to offer.
So invariably when the kids are home during the week I will get a request from one of them to watch a movie, and they will not have one in mind, and they will ask to scroll. And when they find a title, they will ask if they can watch it.
Unfortunately for me, I will probably not have heard of it. And the internet seems unwilling to rate content on the basis of axes I – as a conservative Christian – specifically care about.
Common Sense Media has five major categories for what I’ll call negative content:
- Violence and Scariness
- Sex, Romance, & Nudity
- Language
- Products & Purchases (yes this is a real category)
- Drinking, Drugs, & Smoking
It further rates movies’ positive content in:
- Positive Messages
- Diverse Representations*
- Positive Role Models
*I get that this is a Hollywood thing but I couldn’t care less how many “diverse” characters are in a movie. I’d rather the movie just be accurate to the time and place it’s trying to portray. Consider the live action How To Train Your Dragon which had Stoick explaining in the council scene how an Asian woman even came to live in Viking Berk, referring to “[her] people” even. (I don’t remember the scene having this when I saw it in the theater.) My point is it doesn’t make sense at all to include it, and hand-waving this obvious incongruity away via dialogue is just stupid. And this was just an extra in the scene, not even including all the Netflix historical character revisionism of major historical figures – there’s a whole category of memes mocking this.
(And speaking of Netflix, I’ve already told my girls if the movie/show they want to watch was made in the last ~10 years and was produced by Netflix, just forget about it. E.g. “Anne With An E” started off fine, but their “artistic license” in season 2 would have Lucy Montgomery rolling in her grave.)
Kids-In-Mind.com is better, but very incomplete. The reviews are all hand-written and as a result their catalog is limited.
IMDb takes forever to scroll and find the parents guide for any particular movie.
So I used Claude to vibe code a new parents-first movie review site, using AI generated reviews and measuring each title on axes of common concern, as well as explicitly Christian/religious axes. If an area of concern doesn’t concern you, you can turn it off. If you search for a movie not yet rated, it’ll rate it right then for you, saving the result for everyone else to see. Some ~3500 titles (movies, tv shows, and books) have been AI-rated costing me around $15 so far.
And the site is absolutely privacy first. There’s no user accounts, no cookies, no IP logging (aside from simple rate-limiting), and only anonymized data used for calculating the last week’s worth of trending titles. Besides an initial search, everything else runs on your device: browsing, filtering, likes/dislikes, not interested, recommendations – none of it gets sent to the server, with no plans to ever change this.
Check it out at https://pg.epixian.com
