By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
Once, reviews were handed down from the altars of broadsheets and bylines. Today, film opinions are filtered by algorithms, taking the form of Letterboxd one-liners, TikTok edits, Reddit debates, and YouTube video essays. In this fractured landscape, platforms take on an interesting hybridity — not quite media outlets, libraries, or fandom hubs, but something in between.
Case in point? Peliplat, a self-described “exclusive film buff community” which keeps its gates wide open. I joined this platform and spent a week exploring its corners. At first glance, it is a patchwork: reviews of Marvel and Miyazaki, analyses of cultural appropriation and red carpet fashion, and writing competitions with monthly prizes up to $2,400 USD. Part forum, part watchlist tracker, Peliplat boasts a significant Spanish and Portuguese language user base across Latin America. Now, with a new office in Vancouver, it is looking to grow its English-speaking community.
Beneath its cinephile charm, Peliplat reflects a broader shift in media culture, where the line between users and creators is dissolved. Platforms no longer ask us to merely consume content, they ask us to become it. To review, recommend, like, and post in exchange for the possibility of money, visibility, and validation. Everyone is a critic, and an unpaid labourer.
On the one hand, platforms like Peliplat decentralize critique by creating spaces for new voices across languages and lands. On the other, they often replicate the same extractive logic they are trying to subvert. A writing contest becomes a content pipeline. A user review becomes data. Marketed as liberation, it distributes the labour of cultural production across more hands, more screens, more time.
Platforms like Peliplat hold potential, but only if its fragmented multilingual publics carve out the space for something deeper — to build a vocabulary of resistance inside systems built for speed and mass consumption.
And then there is the platform itself. In trying to do everything from movie and TV show libraries with personalized recommendations to video feeds, does Peliplat risk being nothing in particular? If Letterboxd is a diary and Rotten Tomatoes a consensus, Peliplat aspires to a public square — messy, multilingual, still figuring out the rules. But to do that, it needs more than activity. It needs intentionality, a reason to linger, meaningful dialogue. Otherwise, it risks becoming yet another busy interface. To be more, Peliplat must cultivate depth and curiosity.
Because if everyone can have a voice, those voices must not be collapsed into content. When critique becomes a style, clickable and algorithm ready, it becomes a performance, not a reflection. And the language we build around films becomes thinner, less careful. Designed for engagement, not understanding.
What Peliplat really is remains to be seen. A cinephile haven? A decentralized media experiment? Or just another site capitalizing on our hunger for connection in a world starved of physical third-spaces? It gestures towards something promising, a global commons of cultural conversations, but hasn’t figured out how to sustain that promise without feeding the same content engines with Search Engine Optimization friendly articles.
Perhaps more importantly, it offers us a moment to reflect about what we want our cultural spaces to be. When everyone is a critic and every space is a stage, what happens to criticism as a practice of care, curiosity, or dissent? Can criticism still disrupt, or does it now serve to decorate the scroll? Are we still making meaning — or just feeding into the ever-enlarging world of content creation?
Platforms like Peliplat hold potential, but only if its fragmented multilingual publics carve out the space for something deeper — to build a vocabulary of resistance inside systems built for speed and mass consumption.
