I was about to post my arr suite until i read your last line :D For recommendations i follow some youtube critics (like stories of old, mubi) who regularly provide recommendations and my tastes match with theirs. Then there’s reddit/lemmy movie forums. And i just use QBittorrents in built search to just download if i’m not tracking the movie/tv on my arr stack. And for playback locally i use mpv. I tried streaming services a long time ago but they are incredibly inconvenient compared to how flexible it is to watch/find something on torrents and the quality is also better.
Torrents do work, but be careful if you use any public trackers your IP can get a copyright notice and Oracle takes it seriously, your instance can get shut down.
For transferring files i find sshfs to be the fastest and simplest method.