Overview

Scrolling through streaming platforms and Youtube trying to find relevant clips of interesting movies has come to an end. I built Movie Finder to solve that. It’s a Flask web app that hooks into the TMDb API and gives me multiple ways to discover movies and TV shows in one clean interface. The Discover tab lets me filter by genre, rating range, year, and sort order. The Search tab parses natural language queries like “sci-fi before 2001” or “horror rated 8+” and translates them into structured API calls - it understands genre aliases, decade references, and rating expressions. The Mood tab is my favorite: I pick a mood like “Mind-Bending” or “Nostalgic” and it returns curated results using pre-configured genre and rating combinations. There’s also an Actors tab that ranks actors by their average filmography rating and lets me drill into their full body of work filtered by genre and media type. The whole thing is a single-page app with a dark UI and no framework overhead.

Key Features

• Multi-filter discovery with genre chips, rating ranges, and year filtering
• Natural language smart search with genre aliases and relative date parsing
• 12 mood-based recommendation presets with curated genre and rating logic
• Actor rankings by filmography quality with detailed drill-downs
• Responsive dark UI with movie/TV detail modals

Tech Stack

• Python and Flask
• TMDb API
• Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• ThreadPoolExecutor for parallel API calls