I think what got me really nerdingly interested in films in the first place was an old program called Corel's All Movie Guide. What made it superior to Microsoft's Cinemania was not only that it had 5 times as many listings, but the ingenious 'recommendation engine' that let you rate films, and said what other stuff you should check out, based on what plot keywords each of your favorite films listed. This tool introduced me to countless classics, cult favorites and hidden gems that I would never had found out about otherwise.
I always missed this feature in imdb.
But then I found out about
http://filmaster.com I've been playing around with it a bit and have gotten a few interesting recommendations, that have been just so-so. It can import your ratings from imdb, which is a great plus, but after that, rating films can be a quite tedious business. The suggestions of what films I should check out have also been quite strange. I suspect the main problem is that the site seems be used by mainly Polish people, which gives a somewhat biased scale of what films are supposed to be good and not. Of the several hundred films the site wants me to see, at least 75% are Polish. Also, the site is horribly slow.
I recently discovered
http://www.criticker.com and tried that out instead, and for now, it seems to be more accurate according to my tastes. Rating films is much easier and faster, and within an hour or so, I had rated a few hundred films. This site lacks any imdb import, but instead there's a function that suggests a random selection of 25 films (from blockbusters to rare cult gems) that you can all rate in seconds. The films it has been recommending has been both spot on (films I have seen and love, but just haven't rated yet) and also quite interesting.
The very best would be if this could all be implemented into eXtreme Movie Manager, and/or compatible with IMDB, but I guess that will never happen.
Anyone else have any experience with any of these, or something similar?