Great job! I've long wanted to work on this problem because I think there's so much more that can be done. You definitely seem headed in the right direction.
1. I want to follow all my favorite movie-makers and actors and get an email every time they make something new.
2. I want to go through all the movies they've made that I missed.
3. I want to discover new great people to follow by finding great movies.
I'm in the same boat, I was always looking for a way to get notifications when a new movie from a certain director or with actors I like is available, get a list with all the movies they were starring in or just get notifications if a movie produced in a certain country is available.
Ironically the solution which works best are the notification settings from Gazelle [0] based private movie trackers.
I blame the lack of sites offering this feature on the very restrictive IMDB API which isn't exactly fun to work with and expensive to get access to if you don't want to work with a dump which doesn't even include the latest data.
1. I want to follow all my favorite movie-makers and actors and get an email every time they make something new.
2. I want to go through all the movies they've made that I missed.
3. I want to discover new great people to follow by finding great movies.
In order of importance, for me.
Good luck!