Beginning with pioneering projects in the late 2000s, digital humanities—historically dominated by text scholarship—has increasingly expanded into film studies. Scholars interested in applying analytical methods such as distant reading to audiovisual materials are developing annotation tools unique to film, in contrast to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) used for written texts. Led by principal investigator Alison Cooper, the digital humanities project Kinolab aims to provide a “platform for the digital analysis of film language in narrative film and media”. It uses copyright compliant film and television clips comprising a broad historical and stylistic range, academically crowdsourced and annotated with language tags derived from a controlled vocabulary. This review considers the strengths and weaknesses of Kinolab as a digital humanities project, critically examining its data set, methodology, and the underlying assumption of a film “language” central to its primary goal. Moreover, in evaluating Kinolab this review offers broader considerations for the inherent challenges of applying digital humanities methods to audiovisual resources.