The Journal section has been upgraded to be more visually interesting as well as more flexible for us to provide you with interesting information about enjoying movies, whether they are showing in theaters or at home!

You may have noticed that we have been writing articles since we founded The BigScreen Cinema Guide in 1995 (it was then called the Penguin Cinema Guide). Since that time, more than 5,800 articles have been written about movies, theaters, home theater, and anything else that we think our readers may be interested in relating to movies.

Redesigned Journal Section

You'll notice when you go to the main page of the Journal section that it has been upgraded with a better layout and more interesting way to provide an overview of recent articles that we've written. We hope that you like the new layout, and we're always interested in hearing your comments through our Feedback form!

Home Video Category

A recent addition was a category for "Home Video" where we could talk more about movies that we can watch at home. While we've written such articles in the past, the current shutdown of nearly every movie theater in the country has caused us to emphasize that topic some more. As a result, we saw a need to create a new Home Video category for just that topic, so new and previous articles could be identified under that category.

Check out a list of Home Video articles!

Change from Rigid Categories to Flexible Keywords

As we were making the addition of the Home Video category, it became clear that our current approach of having even seven topics in which to categorize the articles wasn't flexible enough for our future needs. Each article could only be categorized in one way, which meant that we needed to choose which category an article belonged in, even if there was logical overlap.

Now, we have the ability to assign multiple keywords to an article, which will provide us with much more flexibility in the future to provide links to articles from many different directions on the site.

An example of this is a recent article about promotion at Gift Shop merchant Amazon.com. Previously, an article like Get 3 Movies for the Price of 2 at Amazon would have been categorized in the Gift Shop category, even though there is a case to be made for it to be under the new Home Video category. Now, it can be both! That article is now identified under both keywords, which means that you'll find it no matter which you visit.

When you visit the list of Home Video articles, for example, you'll see a row of buttons at the top of the page with "Home Video" highlighted. If you select that button again, it will take you back to the main Journal page where you can see all articles. If you select a different keyword, such as "Gift Shop," you'll see all the Gift Shop articles, and the aforementioned article will be found in both listings.

We're looking forward to the opportunities this opens up!

Not-New-but-Cool Feature: Journal Articles Related to Movies

While it's not new, I wanted to take this opportunity to draw your attention to the Journal Entries page for each movie on our site. When a movie is rescheduled, or photos are added, or it comes up in the news for another reason, we'll often write an article and the related movies are tagged in such a way that you can see all related articles where that movie has been mentioned.

Take, for example, the Journal Entries page for the new James Bond movie, No Time to Die:

There are currently thirteen articles related to that movie on that page, going all the way back to when it was announced in July 2017.

Not-New-but-Cool Feature: Journal Articles Related to Theaters

Like the previous item, this isn't new, but I wanted to draw your attention to the Journal Entries page for each theater on our site as well. This allows you to see any news articles that we've written pertaining to that theater.

Here is a screenshot of the Journal Entries page for the Marcus Majestic Cinema of Brookfield:

There are 77 articles in the list, dating all the way back to when the theater was announced in January 2002.

Some theaters have more articles, while some others have less, but all in all, it provides what we think is likely the largest single source of indexed news and information for movie theaters available.