Rating System – [SC] Salvaged Cinema

Every movie in Salvaged Cinema eventually receives a final, dichotomous, disposition. Save or Delete.

[SAVE] — Retention Approved, find you a copy. The movie has earned a permanent place in the Salvaged Cinema pantheon.

[DELETE] — No Retention Value, hunt down at your own peril. We’ve seen it. We’ve documented it. We don’t need to keep it. Hard drives are expensive.

A Save doesn’t necessarily mean a movie is good, and a Delete doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. It answers one question:

Is this movie worth salvaging?

[Nudity Bonus]

A tradition carried over from Salvaged Cinema’s sister site, the now defunct Legacy of Cheese. If a movie contains qualifying nudity, male or female, we don’t pick sides here, it receives the Nudity Bonus.

The Nudity Bonus has absolutely no bearing on whether a movie receives a Save or Delete. It’s just a bonus.

[Rare Salvage]

If a movie is especially endangered, buried, inaccessible, or overlooked, it receives the Rare Salvage Bonus. These are films confined to VHS, long out of print, unavailable through conventional channels, or otherwise in danger of slipping through the cracks forever.

Like the Nudity Bonus, a Rare Salvage Bonus does not affect the Save/Delete verdict.

[Rarity Scale]

Salvaged Cinema also tracks how widely a film has been written about on Letterboxd. This is based on the number of written reviews, not watches or star ratings.

The fewer reviews a film has, the farther it moves toward Critical Salvage.

Well Documented — 1,000+ written reviews
Circulating — 500–999 written reviews
Uncommon — 100–499 written reviews
Extremely Rare — 25–99 written reviews
Critical Salvage — 0–24 written reviews

The archive represents this with a five-position meter running from green on the left to red on the right. Green means the film already has substantial discussion; red means it has very little documented attention and may be especially worth preserving, reviewing, or bringing back into circulation.