The Magic Lantern
One film tonight — picked from what you can actually stream, for reasons you can see.
tvOS 18 or later · Apple TV 4K & HD · a film-rec server reachable on your tailnet (the app ships with sample data so it runs without one)
The Magic Lantern is an Apple TV app for the nightly question of what to watch, answered without an engagement algorithm. It draws from a personal film-recommendation server (film-rec, a read-only MCP server) that knows two things a streaming app never does at once: what is streamable right now across the Criterion Channel, MUBI, HBO Max, and Netflix, and what you have already seen and rated. Every candidate arrives with its evidence — a director you rated 5/5, a country you keep returning to, a decade your library leans toward — and the app's whole job is to present that evidence well and get out of the way. One film at a time, full-bleed, driven entirely by the Siri Remote: swipe between films, click to start one in its streaming app, hold for the full reasoning. The server recommends nothing itself; it supplies the catalog and the taste profile, and the reasoning stays legible on screen rather than buried in a ranking.
Features
- Streamable-only — candidates come from the Criterion Channel's own index (scraped nightly, exact) plus MUBI, HBO Max, and Netflix via TMDB's watch-provider data
- Evidence, not a score — each card says why it surfaced: rated director, shared country, favoured decade, drawn from your own library
- Click to watch — MUBI opens on the film (mubi://films/<slug>, resolved nightly from MUBI's search), HBO Max and Netflix open on a search, Criterion goes through Apple's TV app, which knows the Criterion Channel
- Hold, or Play/Pause, for the Why panel — every evidence line and the slice of your taste profile it came from
- Filter bar one swipe up — affinity vs. discovery, runtime caps, decade, director, include-library
- Honest degradation — an unenriched film shows a typographic card instead of a grey gap, and a link nothing on the TV can open ends on a title card, not an error
- Instant launch — the last pool per filter combination is cached, so the carousel paints before the server answers
- Top Shelf — tonight's picks as posters above the icon on the Home screen; click one to start the film