CineSubBench: Evaluating LLMs on Long-Form Narrative and Cultural Understanding from Multilingual Movie Subtitles

Abstract

Large language models are increasingly evaluated in specialized domains such as law, medicine, software engineering, and cybersecurity, yet film remains comparatively underexplored despite requiring long-form narrative integration, multilingual interpretation, and culturally situated audience judgments. We introduce CineSubBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-context film understanding from multilingual movie subtitles. A subtitle track represents a film as thousands of short, temporally ordered utterances from which models must reconstruct characters, relationships, events, causal progression, and themes without explicit scene or event structure. CineSubBench contains 1,012 films with complete subtitle coverage in six languages, yielding 6,072 tracks and 8.13M timestamped subtitle entries. It provides a matched multi-task, multilingual, and multicultural (MultiX) evaluation setting: seven tasks span narrative reconstruction and abstraction, genre prediction, age suitability, country-specific motion-picture ratings across ten national classification systems, and subtitle-grounded language safety. Across nine LLMs, plot premises are recovered more reliably than event-complete synopses; cross-lingual consistency varies substantially across models and languages; national rating systems expose distinct calibration patterns; and strong profanity is far easier to ground than mild obscenity. CineSubBench establishes film as a long-context LLM evaluation domain and provides a unified benchmark for measuring narrative, multilingual, cultural, and evidence-grounding capabilities.