New York, April 12. (AP): While moviegoers' conversations are shushed in cinemas, the Internet is full of the chatter of movie fans discussing, rating and dissecting their favourite films.

Flixter.com is a fast-growing social networking site built entirely around love for movies. It has compiled more than 380 million movie ratings from users.

After forming a profile that can include clips from films, users generally rate movies and share recommendations with their friends. The milieu is plainly populist and young.

It is also worth wondering if anyone needs a broad online community limited to movies _ MySpace and Friendster both highlight users' favourite films as one component of profiles.

Netflix, the subscription-by-mail movie-rental service, also offers the chance to rank movies and share the films scheduled for rental. At Netflix.com, you can e-mail a ``Movie Note'' to a friend about a particular film.

The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) was one of the Internet's first great sites, and it remains an essential tool for any movie fan. It recently underwent a redesign to increase the number of photos, but it largely kept its information-stuffed style.

The site predictably contains a list of the highest-rated films (``The Godfather'' leads with a score of 9.1), but it also amusingly lists the ``Bottom 100.'' Last year's little-seen ``Crossover,'' a story about a basketball player who uses his college scholarship to become a doctor, has the misfortune of ranking last at 1.3.

If you still want critics _ not other movie fans _ to guide your movie-watching, several sites compile reviews.

RottenTomatoes.com has long brought together critical reactions to movies and video games, though it sometimes makes questionable choices in classifying all reviews as either positive or negative.

Likewise, MetaCritic.com averages critical response to movies, DVDs, CDs, games, books and TV shows. With a range from 0-100, scores are weighted to give certain critics more significance than others.

It is far from a totally accurate system (many influential publications such as the New Yorker or The New York Times do not give number values to their reviews), but it is still a worthy compilation.

With such a gluttony of recommendations, it is no wonder the influence of the solo film critic has waned. A valued source can now be a nobody or a number.

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