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Sunday, August 23rd, 2026

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How to get ratings on several movies

I am a subscriber to the Criterion Channel, which has several usually high quality and art movies that periodically rotate in and out each month. I prefer to watch certain genres of movies, such as film noir with a rating of 7.0 or higher by IMDb standards. I can get lists of movies that the Criterion Channel have featured for the month, such as "November Noir" for example, which may have four to ten movie titles that are shown for the month.  

I'm a Python programmer, and have made a program that web-scraped the Criterion Channel for certain genres and then provided the IMDb site with these titles to get the rating. My program no longer works with changes made at IMDb, perhaps to prohibit web-scraping. How can I now get movie ratings without having to look each title up individually? 

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28 days ago

Please see https://www.imdb.com/conditions/ regarding scraping the IMDb site which is not permitted, specifically:

Robots and Screen Scraping: You may not use data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on this site

If you are an active data contributor to IMDb, please see https://contribute.imdb.com/dataset for details of which data sets you can access off-line.

If not, please see https://datasets.imdbws.com/ -- the entire ratings data set is available for personal non-commercial use and may suit your needs. 

Hope this helps. 

2 Messages

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82 Points

Hi, 

Thanks for the information. I did get the IMDb datasets you specified and used them for my python program with success. As I said, I get lists of categorical movies from the Criterion Channel and want to see the ratings of them first before I watch any. I can continue to see the movie ratings with these datasets and my program to judge weather I want to see a particular movie. 

Thank you, 
Walter Goedecke