Both of those solutions are the same thing. You need to create collections (or check the "automatically create collections" option) in order to pare down all the movies from being shown directly in the library. You can also create your own smart collections for Genres and Decades in order to make it easier to find something to watch. All these can also be 'pinned' to the top of the library by adding special characters to the beginning of the "sort name."

I've also split out my libraries by regular/animated for both TV and movies so Movies, Animated Movies, Television, Animated Television. It works pretty well for me and I have about 3k movies at this point.