I've spent the last year building Clusterflick — a site that pulls together cinema listings from across London so you can see everything showing, everywhere, without jumping between a dozen different websites. It started as a personal itch: I just wanted to know what was on (for the backstory, see my intro post)
But the more I used it, the more I realised I was only solving half the problem. I could tell you what was showing at which venue — but I couldn't tell you if the screening was part of a film club, whether the club screenings were accessible, or even that the club existed at all. London has a genuinely brilliant film club scene: community cinemas, genre nights, archive screenings, disability-led clubs. Most of them are invisible unless you already know to look for them.
That felt wrong. These communities deserve better than a buried events page most people never find.
What I Built
Two new features, both aimed at making London's film club community more discoverable.
Film Club Pages
clusterflick.com/film-clubs gives each film club its own dedicated page. Each page shows their logo, a short description of who they are and what they programme, links back to their own site, and — crucially — pulls together their full upcoming lineup across all the venues they screen at. A lot of clubs move around; they're not tied to a single cinema. Clusterflick now reflects that.
To give a sense of the range:
Bar Trash programmes cult and curiosity films for people who've exhausted the mainstream;
Pitchblack Playback runs immersive listening sessions in the dark, using cinema sound systems the way most people never get to hear them;
and Lost Reels specialises in bringing forgotten, lost, or otherwise unavailable films back to UK screens.
Three very different clubs, all doing something you won't find on a standard listings site, and all working across multiple venues.
I also included accessibility information on each club page, surfaced directly from the screening data. If a club regularly programmes relaxed screenings or subtitled showings, that's highlighted. It shouldn't take three clicks to find out whether a club is somewhere you can actually go.
Near Me
clusterflick.com/near-me uses the browser's location API to show you what's geographically closest to wherever you are right now — venues, films showing there, and the film clubs attached to those screenings. It's not trying to be Google Maps. The goal is simpler: give someone a starting point. "What's on near me tonight?" is one of the most natural questions in the world, and it's surprisingly hard to answer if you don't already know which cinemas are in your area. And alongside "what's on near me?", it now also answers "what film clubs are near me?" — surfacing the clubs connected to those local venues.
Together, these two features turn Clusterflick from a listings aggregator into something closer to a community directory.
Clusterflick is an open-source web app that aggregates film screenings from
across London cinemas into a single, searchable interface. Compare screenings
find showtimes, and discover what's on — whether you're chasing new releases or
cult classics.
Features
Unified Cinema Listings — Browse film screenings from 240+ London cinemas
in one place
Rich Movie Data — View ratings and reviews from IMDb, Letterboxd
Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes
Multiple Event Types — Find movies, TV screenings, comedy, music events,
talks, workshops, and more
Venues & Boroughs — Browse all cinemas by venue or explore all 33 London
boroughs
Festival Pages — Dedicated pages for London film festivals with full
programme listings
Accessibility Filters — Filter by audio description, subtitles, hard of
hearing support, relaxed screenings, and baby-friendly showings
Geolocation — Sort venues by distance from your current location
The site is built with Next.js and TypeScript, hosted on GitHub Pages. The film club pages are server-side rendered — all the data is known ahead of time, so they can be fully built at deploy. Near Me is the opposite: since it depends on the user's location, there's nothing to pre-render. The venue and screening data loads client-side, and the results appear once both that data and the user's location are available.
The Near Me logic is straightforward in principle: grab the user's coordinates from the browser Location API, load the cinema location data from the data pipeline, calculate distances, sort, render. The trickier part was deciding what "near" means when you're in London. After some trial and error, 2 miles turned out to be the sweet spot — enough to surface a decent set of options without stretching the definition of "nearby" too far.
For the film club pages, the main work was research and curation. I used Claude to help with the initial research pass — pulling together descriptions, verifying club details, and drafting copy — then reviewed and edited everything manually. The club-to-screening relationships come from the data pipeline, which already tags screenings with their organiser where that data is available. In the end I've added 22 clubs to the system, and over time I'll continue to add more.
CI/CD runs via GitHub Actions. The data pipeline runs twice a day, and the site rebuilds automatically each time it finishes — so listings stay fresh without any manual intervention. I can also kick off a deployment manually when there are site updates to ship.
This has been sitting in my GitHub issues for the last few months — five separate issues, all variations on the same ask; "what's nearby?" and "how do I find film clubs?". I kept kicking them down the road. This weekend challenge was the forcing function I needed to actually ship them. 🎉
