1 General Sites
1.1 The Internet Movie Database
Arguably the best place to start looking for information about a specific film, the Internet Movie Database boasts a wealth of details for over 200,000 titles not only regular films, but also TV films and TV shows. The basic way to use it is just to enter the name of the movie you want to learn more about in the search window. From the resulting page, you can consult detailed information on cast and crew, users' ratings and reviews, external reviews, plot summaries and memorable quotes, related websites, pictures, and so on. Among the so-called 'Fun stuff' are the categories of trivia and goofs, the latter being the small inconsistencies in a film that extremely attentive viewers have note.
There are other ways to use the vast database maintained by IMDb. If you click 'Browse IMDb' in the list called 'Also available', you obtain an overview of the possibilities, including, for instance, a selection of available titles by genre, year, title, or country you might want to try http://us.imdb.com/Sections/Countries/USA to try an American title search. For a powerful search engine that allows intricate combinations, try IMDb's power search at http://us.imdb.com/list.
1.2 Movies.com
Movies.com is a good-looking website with a convenient Site Tour. Apart from trailers and pictures, what you can find is a very short synopsis and a brief and very convenient list of reviews, with links to the full reviews available online and a possibility for users to add their own reviews, making up the You Say counterpart to the They Say-review section. This sort of material is fully available for new and upcoming films, but not always for older movies, of which the Movies.com database is said to contain some 30,000 entries. Looking up such non-'mainstream' motion pictures as Raining Stones or Before the Rain, for instance, will not even yield a still from the film, let alone reviews or a synopsis. You will need QuickTime to enjoy the extensive trailers section of this site.
1.3 MovieWeb: The Internet Movie Network
The information on offer at MovieWeb is perhaps rather cut-and-dry, but it does give swift access to the most basic information about a film that is, the plot summary and some stills as provided by the movie studio. The MovieWeb database contains some 2,000 titles of movies from 1995 up to the present and in fact, the near future, as some titles whose release is imminent are featured as well. Among the available features is an all-time top 50 based on ticket receipts , and an entire part of the website devoted to home video.
1.4 The Greatest Films
At the centre of Tim Dirks' Greatest Films site is his selection of 100 Greatest Films, along with 100 More Greats, arranged alphabetically in the separate lists, but chronologically in the combined 200 Greatest Films list. All of the first one hundred, and most of the second hundred, receive an in-depth discussion adorned by film posters. It should be noted that the stress is unequivocally on 'classic Hollywood/American films'. A great bonus of Dirks' discussions is that they contain large chunks of dialogue from the films. Additionally, rankings from magazines and other sites have been included and critically evaluated.
Apart from top-one hundreds, you can also look for films that received an oscar and films, and great actors and directors that didnt but should have. Furthermore: greatest moments and scenes, greatest directors, greatest film star roles and screen legends, film genres and film histories, quotes and an extensive section selected film references and sources. The Genre section offers concise discussions of different genres with examples of concrete movies. The extensive and well-wrought History section adds to a discussion per decade, a list of greatest films per year. In short, this site is excellent in its genre!
1.5 The American Film Institute Online
The website of the American Film Institute is not always easy to browse, causing one to use the browser's back button rather than the sometimes missing site-internal navigation. The main categories do remain visible on top; the most interesting of which will presumably be 'Showcase' for most visitors unless if you are interested in the history of the AFI itself or, say, in their Cybershop. As a celebration of one hundred years of moviemaking, the AFI had a selection of one hundred stars and one hundred movies made and published. The stars list offers only a very limited amount of information on the star, and the movies list yielded a multitude of database errors on clicking the film titles. There are better things on offer in the Showcase section, though: the Dustin Hoffman page is nice, the online video of a seminar on 2001: A Space Odyssey may be of interest to fans of the film and its makers, and the transcripts of the Harold Lloyd Seminars feature interviews with important people from within the film industry, such as actor Sidney Poitier and director James Cameron.
An interesting part of AFI's site is dedicated to a rare and early silent film production of Richard III, dating as far back as 1912. You will have to reach it through an elaborate trajectory though: Showcase AFI Digital Screening Room AFI newsreels Richard III. If you then pick the 'Back to Richard III page', you will actually reach the starting page on Richard III. As a final suggestion, you may want to try the AFI's Life Achievement Award's website (via the 'Awards' section), one in which the AFI does succeed in producing convincing and interesting material on the select group of people who received the LAA including for instance Fred Astaire, Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorsese.
In all, the AFI's website has some really nice things on display, but it could have been better managed and more extensively elaborated. On the practical side, you will need QuickTime for some videos that are included in the website.
1.6 alwaysI.com
For a look at independent, virtually unknown films and
short films, alwaysI.com might be a suitable place to hang out. Considering
the status of these small independent films, it is perhaps understandable
that not a great deal of information is offered per film. If you want to
see the clips that have been made available online, you will have to register
and log in (free of charge).
2 Collections of links to movie sites
If you want to find your way to websites on specific film-related issues, the following links sites may be of help.
2.1 About.com: Movies
http://home.about.com/movies/index.htm
The About network maintains an elaborate and well-organized movie site, set up in the solid About.com-style. Apart from chats and polls available directly from the opening page, the site directs you to a number of subsites such as Actor's Exchange, Hollywood Movies/Reviews and Classic Movies. Each of those subsites contains a Subjects index from which you can choose, and which yields a selection of links on that specific topic.
2.2 ZDnet: Rule of Thumb
http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/mag/9906/ebert.html
Leading American film critic Robert Ebert presents the best movie sites on the web in several categories, such as Best Movie Site, Best Overlooked Online Critic, Greatest Greatest Site, Best Worst Site, and others. Ebert adds a short review of each site he recommends, and his choice is certainly very convincing.
2.3 The Cinema Connection
http://online.socialchange.net.au/tcc
For a very plain but well-organized database of links, you will want to try out The Cinema Connection, which groups a total of nearly three thousand links into 38 main categories (with subcategories each time), such as Actors, Cinema History, Film Titles, Genres and Subjects, Screenwriting and World Cinema.
2.4 Film at britannica.com
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/internet_guide_display_page/0,5866,4449089,00.html
The web guide counterpart of the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica offers fourteen subcategories in its Arts: Film section. Each of these is further subdivided. All sites referred to from the britannica pages receive a brief description, and a rating from one up to five stars. The IMDb, for instance, justly received the highest ranking.
2.5 Filmbug Movie and Movie Star Search
If you are looking for links about specific movies or
movie stars, Filmbug is a good place to search. The stress on its main
page clearly is on current films and stars, so if you want to try this
site for older glories, you should try its A-Z directories of movies and
movie stars or its easy-to-use search window.
3 Film History
3.1 The Complete History of the Discovery of Cinematography
From the discovery of the pinhole image to the first moving pictures appearing on the scene in the late 1800's, the 'prehistorical' stages of cinema cover some 2,500 years. Canadian film historian Paul T. Burns is to be congratulated on the prodigious achievement he brought about in this fifteen chapters long, well-documented history, amply illustrated and provided with links where useful. Add to that the easy navigation and quick loading, and you end up with a brilliant example of a truly good website.
3.2 Robert E. Yahnke's Cinema History
http://www.gen.umn.edu/faculty_staff/yahnke/film/cinema.htm
University of Minnesota Professor Robert E. Yahnke provides a historic survey of the cinema, from the films of the Silent Era to the 'Independent Films' and 'New Voices' of the late 80's in ten chapters. It starts out really well, offering a plain but non-superficial history told from a personal perspective, but in later chapters, no more text is offered to complement the list of recommended film titles. From Robert E. Yahnke's site, more is available than this somewhat eclipsed film history, viz. lists of his personal top 20 films for 1997, 1998 and 1999 with a discussion of his choice, lists of great films and great directors the latter with some commentary and some additional film links.
3.3 The Greatest Films
(Full discussion: see General sites)
Tim Dirks' Greatest Films site includes a fairly detailed history of the cinema per decade, with additional lists of the most important films of the year. More elaborate than Robert E. Yahnke's overview, for instance.
3.4 The Film 100
Film 100 presents a ranking of the one hundred most influential people in cinema history in an attractive website using a system with two windows to aid easy navigation. Notoriety or fame were not at stake in the selection: "We simply let the contributions be supported by their own proliferation." Apart from well-known names such as Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, silent film pioneer D.W. Griffith, director Stanley Kubrick, Marilyn Monroe, reviewers Siskel&Ebert, and so on, Film 100 consequently also includes commentary on virtually unknown, but important people in film history, such as the highest paid screenwriter of the forties, Dalton Trumbo, or the entrepreneur Mike Todd who did not invent the amorphic wide-screen process later dubbed CinemaScope, but was more successful in drawing Hollywood's attention to it than was its French inventor Henri Chretien. For each name on the list, a well-written essay is provided, complemented with some quotes appearing on top of the page, a link to top films associated with the name under consideration, and links to related sites.
3.5 Classic Films
Moderntimes.com is a very stylish site of classic films, including the so-called B-films that were originally introduced as 'second feature' films on display along with a more prominent production. Additional features cover the genre of screwball comedies, Black Americans in early Hollywood, and tributes to actor Edward G. Robinson and actress Barbara Stanwyck, who both never received an Oscar but should have, at least according to the maker of these pages (Michael Mills). In addition to over twenty essays on directors, films, genres, and the like, Moderntimes.com features lots of images and audio clips.
3.6 The Silents Majority
The Silents Majority Online Journal of Silent Film is not a very fancy website, but it does contain very detailed contributions (and is definitely better than the "Silent Movies" website at www.csse.monash.edu.au/~pringle/silent, although the latter's Silent Star of the Month section is worthwhile). You can access the latest additions from the Current Issue, including among others featured books, videos and performers, birthdates of silent film makers, reports from silent film festivals, and so on. From the main index of the website, the most interesting sections to be accessed are presumably 'The Silent Era', containing well over a hundred very detailed profiles of producers, directors, writers and stars of the silent era, and book and video reviews, and the 'Silents Specialists' section featuring in-depth articles on selected topics to do with silent films. In terms of 'multimedia', The Silents Majority offers its 'Dreamland' section with QuickTime movies, and a Photo Gallery. The Silents Majority is, in all, a solid website from which especially the detailed and numerous profiles on makers of silent films is worth a visit. The fact that the website did seem to load rather slowly constitutes the only minus.
3.7 Martin Hart's American Widescreen Museum
www.simplecom.net/widefilm/index.htm
Martin Hart's website details the history of a number of technical developments in the history of cinema wide screen cinema, color cinematography and sound development. Additionally, images of some early film posters are available from the Poster Gallery. The concept of building an online museum is elaborated in a charmingly consistent way ("No Food or Drinks Allowed. (Unless you can share with everyone else) Cigars are acceptable. A couple of us will be smoking our pipes."), and great effort has been paid to keeping the ever further subdividing site navigable. It is a well-illustrated website that manages to render technical issues interesting even to the slightly disinterested through its humoristic tone. The only minus is constituted by the rather plain backgrounds and large fonts but it takes a real nitpicker to draw very long on that. Heartily recommended!
3.8 The Projection Box Museum of the Moving Image
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/%7Es-herbert/ProjectionBox.htm
The Projection Box gives access to a museum tour recreating the Precursors of Cinema and Early Film sections of the Museum of the Moving Image which existed in London from 1988 to 1999. The lay-out is not always very distinguished, but a tour of the museum is very much worth its while, as it offers fairly detailed and amply illustrated information on all sorts of optical toys and precinematic devices that eventually led to cinema as we know it the camera obscura, the magical lantern, the so-called phenakistiscope, the kinetoscope, and so on. You will need a QuickTime plug-in to enjoy the music featured on many of the pages of this virtual museum.
3.9 The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture
www.ex.ac.uk/bill.douglas/menu.html
The Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter (UK) contains a collection of miscellaneous items pertaining to the history of film and visual media. Apart from some snapshots with captions from collections of the Centre, the Virtual Exhibitions section features two more elaborate, nicely documented and interesting virtual annexes of exhibitions held previously at the Centre: Alfred Hitchock Presents: Celebrating the Centenary of Britain's Greatest Filmmaker and D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Cinema.
3.10 American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library
The American Memory website at the Library of Congress hosts over 80 digital historical collections, including not only pictures and audio recordings, but also what is our focus in this section: motion pictures. You can access the collection via the Collection Finder or Search the database on keywords (a search on Film yields 500 matches), but perhaps the easiest way is to browse the full which is included on the Search page.
On the one hand, you will find some collections offering very early motion pictures containing scenes from everyday life: of particular interest in connection with American film are, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film, featuring among others a filmed 1912 visit to Roosevelt at his house, and America at Work, America at Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894-1915, detailing the life at work, at school and at leisure of Americans in that period by means of a total of 111 films.
On the other hand, one section is included which relates directly to the development of cinema, more specifically of animations: Origins of American Animation, 1900-1921. The Special Presentation section unlocks a treasure of 21 films and two fragments with information about the films, and video playback. Still very remote from the intricate special effects and computer animation of the present day, these films offer a truly fascinating look at the origins of cinematic entertainment make sure to try such marvels as the 1902 Fun in a Bakery Shop or the 1906 Humorous Phases of Funny Faces! You can opt for RealPlayer, QuickTime or MPEG (Windows MediaPlayer) format each time.
3.11 The National Film Preservation Board (Library of Congress)
In order to study the history of film, preservation of what has been produced over the past decades is an important and very technical issue: various chemical processes threaten to destroy film tapes. It is estimated that only some 20 % of American silent films still survive in complete form. Apart from an extensive list of links to research centers and movie archives, the website of the National Film Preservation Board at the Library of Congress gives access to information about preservation of films. The Preservation Research section adds to lengthy and detailed (official) reports on film preservation, a photo gallery illustrating the damage that film tapes may run into. The National Film Registry section lists the films that have been added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry since its inception in 1989 at a rate of 25 per year, some 275 films are now on the list. Finally, clicking 'National Film Preservation Foundation' yields the website www.filmpreservation.org, the NFPF being an independent, nonprofit public-private partnership. A good resource for technical information on film decay processes is to be found in the 'Preservation basics' 'Film decay & how to slow it' section of this handsome website. Furthermore, you can consult the list of over 275 films and collections preserved with support from the NFPF, and learn about and view a few so-called orphan films i.e. films without commercial owners to pay the costs of preservation. A final noteworthy feature of this site is the Community of Film Archives, a database of film archives all over the USA searchable via a clickable map of the states.
3.12 Motion-Picture Industry: Behind the Scenes
http://library.thinkquest.org/10015/
ThinkQuest (www.thinkquest.org) offers the environment for students to develop educational websites. One of those student-authored websites is devoted to the history and techniques of cinema: Behind the Scenes. The Motion-Picture Industry website could make for interesting classroom interactivity as it boasts some neat devices to stimulate creativity: a screenwriting utility, an online simulation of how to make a film, and the story of how a short film came to be made.
The information section (http://library.thinkquest.org/10015/data/info/reference) is well-structured and interesting. It is ranked under Film History in our overview because, apart from the separate section on history, most of the various other sections, detailing the mechanics, production, effects and techniques of film-making, contain a feature on the history of the topic under discussion. Some of the sections also include a section called 'Get into the action', which incites students to experiment with some of the principles that have been introduced.
From the information section, you can access a glossary
explaining a variety of terms that have been used throughout those pages.
Via the 'Library' section, you gain access to some interviews and also
some student reviews (the latter often being of very poor quality). The
'Exploratory' section leads among other things to a message forum and a
script contest.
4 Film reviews
4.1 Ratings
Motion Picture Association of America
The site of the MPAA is not exactly the right place to
start looking for reviews, but it is the site of the institution that decides
on the ratings that are often included in film reviews rating such as
'PG' (parental guidance suggested) and 'NC-17' (no one 17 and under admitted).
The ratings do not in any way relate to the 'quality' of the film, but
are merely meant as advance information for parents. The MPAA website includes
a searchable ratings database, containing titles since 1968. Should you
be looking for amazingly detailed information on the appearance of scenes
of nudity, violence, swearing, even jumping, smoking and inappropriate
music, you can search www.screenit.com
for movie titles, the aim of Screenit.com being to offer "Entertainment
Reviews for Parents". The film reviews in the Christian Science Monitor
(www.csmonitor.com) likewise include
detailed information of this kind, though nothing, including www.kids-in-mind.com,
can top the degree of accuracy offered at Screenit.com.
4.2 Review search engines
4.2.1 Internet Movie Database
From an individual film's page, the IMDb gives access to dozens of so-called external reviews from sites such as those mentioned under 4.3 below, and also to IMDb user comments and some newsgroup reviews, as such offering a quick way of looking up multiple reviews on one and the same motion picture allowing you to discover, after some time, your own favourite critics.
4.2.2 Cinemachine: The Movie Review Search Engine
Cinemachine offers a quick and easy to use search engine, yielding not only links to various reviews on the web, but also a short review from its on site on top of the links list. If you are only after reviews, and you don't need the abundance given at IMDb, this is an excellent site. A sample search did show that IMDb offers more reviews (e.g. 31 against 183 for American Beauty), and the way the Cinemachine is organized is not entirely clear (e.g. the search yields no review for Before the Rain, even though such is available from Roger Ebert's website, one that is indexed for other films), the somewhat smaller selection makes the search more feasible.
4.2.3 Movie Review Query Engine
The Movie Review Query Engine works in similar fashion as does Cinemachine, but offers more hits which should come as no surprise, as it is allied with IMDb and includes all the newsgroup reviews also available from IMDb (and originally posted on rec.arts.movies.reviews). On the down side, the search results are not split up in separate categories as they are in the IMDb reviews section; on the up side, it does give reviews for less well-known films such as Before the Rain.
4.3 Review sites
4.3.1 Film.com
Not surprisingly, this Real.com-owned site contains a lot of audio and video content. You can get by with the free RealPlayer Basic for most of such material, but if you want to watch the available interviews, you are supposed to buy a pay version (RealPlayer GoldPass) Even without such luxuries, the site remains an attractive one, with among its features the sections 'The Best Films You've Never Seen' reviews of unknown but wrongfully unloved films and 'The Great Ones', dealing with all-time classics such as Citizen Kane, Psycho and Westside Story. At the heart of Film.com is, however, its extensive review section with good and well-written reviews, sometimes even several conflicting reviews on the same film. On of Film.com's reviewers found Magnolia "Sweet, Sad, and Surreal", another thought it amounted to "Monotonous Confessions", for instance. The earliest reviewed film in the database in the 1920 Mask of Zorro. The review database is sometimes a bit slow, and not so easily searchable as it should be.
4.3.2 Roger Ebert on Movies
One of the most important 'film personalities' in the USA as on the internet, Roger Ebert is above all an excellent critic. The online archive at The Chicago Sun-Times contains his reviews since 1985 reviews, that is, of virtually every new film since that date. Add to that over a hundred reviews of 'Great Movies' classics, that are and you are in quality review paradise, Ebert's reviews establishing links with other films and other media (with a penchant for literature), delving deep into its thematics and commenting skilfully on its techniques. You may also want to try 'The Movie Answer Man', a section in which miscellaneous questions (including 'Questions That Will Not Die') on films receive an expert answer, and the short reviews of films currently in theaters in the section 'One-Minute Movie Reviews'.
4.3.3 Roger Ebert & the Movies
http://tvplex.go.com/BuenaVista/SiskelAndEbert
As a follow-up to the successful TV show that was aired for 23 years featuring critics Robert Ebert and the late Gene Siskel, Ebert now co-reviews films with guest critics, summing the reviews up with the notorious 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' that were introduced by Ebert in the Siskel&Ebert show in 1990. Film100.com ranks the Siskel&Ebert partnership among its 100 most influential people in film history. The main feature of the website is that it has streaming audio clips of the reviews, so you can hear the reviews as they were broadcast.
4.3.4 24framespersecond.com a journal of original writing and in-depth review of films and filmmaking
The beautifully sobre, well-organized and easily navigable online journal 24framespersecond.com does what it promises to do, no more, no less: offer a wealth of truly well-written reviews (sometimes more than one per film), essays, and festival reports. In fact, it does offer some more, viz. local movie listings for some North-American cities. Finally, in the 'Off camera' section, you find top-24 listings of users, interviews, best-of-1999-picks, and links.
4.3.5 DesertNet's Film Vault
DesertNet's Film Vault abounds with in-depth reviews, capsule reviews and interviews from various publications of the alternative press. You can browse the entire database, or restrict the list in terms of publication, film genre, and various ways of sorting. On picking out a film, you receive one of the available features typically one of the full-length reviews with links not only to other reviews, short reviews and if applicable, interviews available from the Film Vault, but also to other films by the same director, and to similar films Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, for instance, gets linked to (among others) My Best Friend's Wedding. The main point about the Film Vault is that the reviews are top quality.
4.3.6 Mr. Showbiz
The Mr. Showbiz site has a wider focus than merely movies nomen est omen but there is a lot to be had about films, not only in the News section (which mixes the more substantial news with gossip) but also, not surprisingly, in the separate Movies section, from which you can obtain movie times and, of more general importance, good, full-length reviews. Only older movies such as Casablanca or Some Like It Hot receive but a short review, sometimes even without a still from the film. From the Movies submenu, you may want to try Critics' picks, which combines mostly short articles on specific types of films (e.g. play adaptations, serial killer movies) with links to the Mr. Showbiz discussion of individual films belonging to that genre. It also has some special features such as a Mr. Showbiz top 100 of films, and an additional top 100 based on users' top tens. From the Features section of this website, you gain access to interviews and features, both with their own archives. One interesting feature within the Centurama section looking back on 100 years of film history (offering basically lists of best films and actors), is called Millennium Through the Movies (http://www.mrshowbiz.go.com/features/centurama/criticspicks_index.html ), "recapping the movies that tell the tale of our times" that is, summing up films for different historical eras as an alternative way of learning about history.
4.3.7 Rotten Tomatoes: Movie Reviews and Previews
Rotten Tomatoes has a very convenient way of offering review information on films: every reviewed film has its page with clickable quotes from selected reviews, which on clicking yield the full reviews. The quotes are clearly not chosen at random, but sum up the main opinion of the reviewer. In addition, Rotten Tomatoes summarizes the critical consensus, and finds an analogon to Siskel&Ebert's thumbs up/thumbs down in the fresh or rotten tomatoes (not just for the general critical consensus, but for every separate review), and in the so-called Tomatometer. Furthermore, it also gives box office statistics and trailers. Finally, you can access a news section and a messageboard. On the technical side, a narrow frame of the Rotten Tomatoes site remains on top when surfing to specific reviews, which makes the navigation experience all the more easy.
4.3.8 Critics.com
Built on more or less the same principles as Rotten Tomatoes, Critics.com bases its critical consensus on a median of ratings by various critics (summarizing that with a thumbs up/down image), and offers links to their reviews, opposing in block quotes the extreme opinions. Once you click a specific review link, you do lose the Critics.com website. Film reviews go back to 1996 and can be easily browsed through a few pop-down menus on top of the site. A small, good thing that doesn't appear to be offered from many review websites is the list of featured critics. Also, the short Caveat Emptor merits a quick read: " Hence reviews are not about truth. They are about validity. A review is valid when a critic is successful in making his readers see a movie from a different perspective - especially when they violently disagree with him or her. "
4.3.9 Ain't It Cool News
The independence of Harry Knowles, the maker of the (blatantly ugly) website Ain't It Cool News, is notorious, especially for his (and his contributors') reviews of work in progress (of previews, that is) a dreaded thing among film makers. Apart from reviews, you can look at trailers, take part in live chat and read and contribute to extensive message boards.
4.4 Belgian review sites
4.4.1 Movie de interactieve filmgids
Don't be misled by the 'nl'-suffix of the Movie website: it is Belgian-based and orientated, as is clear, among other things, from its section of films being aired on television, which includes only Belgian channels. Another thing to bear in mind before getting down to brass tacks with this site, is that it appears to be designed for Internet Explorer only that is to say, browsing it in Netscape caused the text to be smeared all over the page on our computer. Indeed, the text, because most of the images appear to constitute missing links Not a good first impression, then, but luckily the site does have a lot of reviews and background articles on offer, and its makers succeed in keeping it up to date.
4.4.2 K.U.T: liefde voor de film
K.U.T. can perhaps best be seen as a more attractive, more recent counterpart to the movie.nl site. The K.U.T. site combines good critical reviews with a sobre, efficient, well-structured lay-out, ànd a tongue-in-cheek style of writing don't feel slighted at the first insult! Overall, the K.U.T. site does not have as much contents as does movie.nl at this point, but it is perhaps slightly better organized, offering, for instance, an overview first of what is discussed in the Classics section (Klassiekers: invasion movies, Lynch, Kubrick, Araki, Hitchcock), whereas there is no way to guess what will be dealt with in the extensive columns and articles section of movie.nl. Among the features at K.U.T. are a film magazine called 'Drie', dealing with such things as the late Alec Guinness, and the principles and products of the DOGMA95 movement, and a section colled 'Spoilers', which is designed to spoil the film fun of those people sufficiently disobedient to read it without having seen the film they look up: what is revealed in Spoilers is the ending of the film
5 Film Genres
Classic Films: B Movies
www.moderntimes.com/palace/b/b.htm
The Astounding B Monster
B-Movie Theater
Oh, the Humanity! The Worst Movies on Earth
The B-Movie Guide
http://www1.50megs.com/finvarra
For much more sites (a total of 190!) on B films, see
Yahoo's
B-Film Webring at http://nav.webring.yahoo.com/hub?ring=bfilm&list.
Film Noir
Film Noir: Fear in the City
http://www.cinemedia.net/NLA/noir.html
Classic Films: High Heels on Wet Pavement (Film Noir and the Femme Fatale)
http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/film_noir/index.html
The Dark Room
http://cinepad.com/filmnoir/dark_room.htm
Images Ten Shades of Noir
http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/infocus.htm
Does Film Noir mirror the culture of contemporary America?
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noirxx.htm
noir alley [with a Netscape bug for at least some Netscape versions; try another browser if you have problems viewing these pages]
Martin's Film Noir Page
http://www.pitt.edu/~lewison/Noir
The Shadows of Film Noir
http://www.angelfire.com/oh2/writer/Shadows1.html
Film Noir Reader
http://members.aol.com/alainsil/noir/
Horror
Monsters (at Washington State University)
http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/monsters.html
The Horror Film: Supernature, Science & Psyche
http://www.cinemedia.net/NLA/horror.html
A History of Horror
http://www.thereelsite.com/commentary/horror.html
The Cabinet of Dr. Casey Horror in Movies
http://www.drcasey.com/movies/index.shtml
Scary Women (at UCLA)
http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/women
Horror Haven
http://www.radzone.org/tkearns/horror.html
Classic Horror Movies Tribute Page
http://rhs.jack.k12.wv.us/classic/welcome.htm
The Haunted Mansion
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Location/9383
The House of Horrors
http://www.houseofhorrors.com/index.htm
Science fiction
The Linköping SF&F Archive: Movies
http://sf.www.lysator.liu.se/sf_archive/sf-texts/movies
sf movie heaven @ starriders.net
http://starriders.net/sfmovies/index.htm
Fritz Lang's Metropolis
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/5555
Metropolis to Independence Day 70 Years Of SciFi Through the Eyes Of TIME
http://www.time.com/time/scifi/index.html
Cybermania: The History of Computers and Artificial Intelligence in Film (at the University of Illinois)
http://128.174.194.59/cybercinema
Sci-Fi Entertainment
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/3382/index.html
Shakespeare adaptations
Mr. Showbiz (Critics' Pick)
http://mrshowbiz.go.com/reviews/moviereviews/criticspicks/CriticsShakespeare_Adaptations.html
About.com: Shakespeare on Film
http://shakespeare.about.com/arts/shakespeare/cs/films/index.htm
Screwball comedy
Classic Films: Screwball Comedy
www.moderntimes.com/screwball/index.html
Screwball Comedy
http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~pswF94/cusp/nostalgia/screw.html
Westerns
The Silent Westerns
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/Westfilm/west.html
Westerns.com
http://www.westerns.com/frames.htm
Mr. Showbiz (Critics' Picks)
http://mrshowbiz.go.com/reviews/moviereviews/criticspicks/CriticsBest_Westerns.html
The Spaghetti Western Genre
http://www.dvdresource.com/savant/s116spaghetti.shtml
CowboyPal, Home of the Silver Screen Cowboys
6 Important American Films, Actors and Directors
6.1 A Choice of American Films
Picking out any limited number of 'best' films is, of course, a somewhat superficial endeavour any choice could have been different, and there is no way you can capture the many-faceted American film history in a single list. Still, we have picked out our own list of favourites and supplied the IMDb link and the in-depth discussion of www.filmsite.org (the latter was not available for the last two films on our list). If you want to find more information on a specific film, the External Links section of the IMDb is an excellent place to start out from.
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0004972
Sunrise (1927)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0018455
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0026138
Modern Times (1936)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0027977
Gone With the Wind (1939)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0031381
Citizen Kane (1941)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0033467
Casablanca (1942)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0034583
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0048545
Some Like It Hot (1959)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0053291
Psycho (1960)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0054215
The Graduate (1967)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0061722
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (UK/USA)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0062622
The Godfather (1972)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0068646
Annie Hall (1977)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0075686
Star Wars (1977)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0076759
Apocalypse Now (1979)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0078788
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0083866
Schindler's List (1993)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0108052
Pulp Fiction (1994)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0110912
American Beauty (1999)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0169547
6.2 A Choice of American Actors
Below we offer the IMDb link and the short description at www.movieactors.com of fifteen of the best and most important American film actors and actresses. For further information, you can always try the External Links section of the IMDb or such web directories as The Cinema Connection (http://online.socialchange.net.au/tcc/Genres_and_Subjects/index.html) or Yahoo's movie index. Some actors are also included in the excellent Film 100 selection (www.film100.com) reviewed under 3.4. Last but not least, the Actors and Actresses section of About.com's Classic Films subsite (http://classicfilm.about.com/movies/classicfilm/cs/actorsactresses/index.htm) gives access to a multitude of links.
Fred Astaire
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Astaire,+Fred
http://www.movieactors.com/30stars/fred.htm
Humphrey Bogart
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Bogart,+Humphrey
http://www.movieactors.com/40stars/bogie.htm
Marlon Brandon
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Brando,+Marlon
http://www.movieactors.com/50stars/marlon.htm
James Dean
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Dean,+James
http://www.movieactors.com/50stars/james.htm
Gene Hackman
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Hackman,+Gene
http://www.movieactors.com/70stars/gene.htm
Dustin Hoffman
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Hoffman,+Dustin
http://www.movieactors.com/80stars/dustin.htm
Clark Gable
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Gable,+Clark
http://www.movieactors.com/30stars/clark.htm
Jack Lemmon
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Lemmon,+Jack
http://www.movieactors.com/60stars/lemmon.htm
Marilyn Monroe
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Monroe,+Marilyn
http://www.movieactors.com/50stars/mm.htm
Jack Nicholson
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Nicholson,+Jack
http://www.movieactors.com/70stars/jack.htm
Al Pacino
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Pacino,+Al
http://www.movieactors.com/70stars/pacino.htm
Sidney Poitier
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Poitier,+Sidney
http://www.movieactors.com/60stars/poitier.htm
Ginger Rogers
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Rogers,+Ginger
http://www.movieactors.com/30stars/ginger.htm
Barbara Stanwyck
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Stanwyck,+Barbara
http://www.movieactors.com/40stars/stanwick.htm
Barbra Streisand
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Streisand,+Barbra
http://www.movieactors.com/70stars/barbara.htm
6.3 A Choice of American Directors
Below we offer the IMDb link of fifteen of the best and most important American (though not necessarily American born) film directors. For further information, you can always try the External Links section of the IMDb or such web directories as The Cinema Connection (http://online.socialchange.net.au/tcc/Genres_and_Subjects/index.html) or Yahoo's movie index. Some directors are also included in the excellent Film 100 selection (www.film100.com) reviewed under 3.4. Finally, you can have a look at the Directors, Producers and Writers section of About.com's Classic Films subsite (http://classicfilm.about.com/movies/classicfilm/cs/directorscrew/index.htm).
Woody Allen
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Allen,+Woody
Robert Altman
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Altman,+Robert
Joel and Ethan Coen
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Coen,+Joel
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Coen,+Ethan
Francis Ford Coppola
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Coppola,+Francis+Ford
Walt Disney
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Disney,+Walt
D.W. Griffith
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Griffith,+D.W.
Elia Kazan
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Kazan,+Elia
Stanley Kubrick
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Kubrick,+Stanley
David Lynch
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Lynch,+David
Martin Scorsese
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Scorsese,+Martin
Steven Spielberg
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Spielberg,+Steven
Quentin Tarantino
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Tarantino,+Quentin
Gus Van Sant
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Van+Sant,+Gus
James Whale
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Whale,+James
Orson Welles
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Welles,+Orson
7 The Studios (and the Indies)
Studio websites are, of course, designed with an overtly commercial goal in mind. Their main interest will lie in basic information about a film plot, cast, credits and usually trailers. The following list is not exhaustive, but does add some smaller studios to the obvious ones. We end the list with INDIEwire.com, a fine site devoted to so-called independent movie productions or 'indies'.
Orion Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Twentieth Century Fox
Universal Studios
Walt Disney Pictures
Warner Bros
Dimension Films
Metro Goldwyn Mayer
United Artists
http://www.mgm.com/cgi-bin/c2k/ua_main.html
Miramax
Sony Pictures Entertainment Movies
www.spe.sony.com/movies/index.html
Troma Studios
United International Pictures
Universal Pictures
Fine Line Features
DreamWorks SKG
Destination Films
Trimark Pictures
Artisan Entertainment
Castle Rock Entertainment
USA Films
indieWIRE
8 Film Festivals and Awards
8.1 Film Festivals
8.1.1 The Cinema Connection: Film Festivals
http://online.socialchange.net.au/tcc/Film_Festivals
In order to find your way through the enormous number of film festivals represented on the Web, you can try The Cinema Connection for a collection of links, for instance some eighty links to USA based film festivals at http://online.socialchange.net.au/tcc/Film_Festivals/USA/index.html.
8.1.2 Film Festivals.com
Film Festivals.com, the top resource on film festivals,
is easy to browse and holds practical information on an impressive amount
of film festivals. You can search the database of festivals per country
or per month, or try the selection made by Filmfestivals.com. Some festivals
that are currently being held, and some really big names (Cannes, Oscars,
Berlin) have elaborate separate pages devoted to them. Trying the link
for Cannes, for instance (http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes_2000/index.htm),
yields a page with reports, reviews, interviews (including streaming RealPlayer
video), and more. The films both of the official and of the parallel selection
receive a solid discussion with a stress on its director and their career.
Via the Festivals Archive, you can look up websites at Film Festivals.com
on former important festivals from 1995 up to 2000. Another interesting
option is the Films search, with credits, synopsis and review for the more
important productions not, for instance, for the small Belgian production
Everybody
Famous. Incidentally, the entire Film Festivals.com site is available
in French as well as English. Among the festivals you may want to pay a
virtual visit are the Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (www.berlinale.de)
and the Cannes International Film Festival (www.festival-cannes.org).
8.2 Awards
8.2.1 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The most interesting part of the Academy's website is, without doubt, its searchable database, from which you can learn what productions and which people were nominated for and/or won oscars from 1927 up to now. Apart from the actual Academy Awards, you can also search a database containing nominees and receivers of the Scientific and Technical Awards, which have been awarded since 1930 to honour the inventors of important technical devices in the motion picture industry. Naturally, you can find other information about the Oscars, such as the history and the rules of the ceremony.
8.2.2 Oscar.com: TheOfficial Academy Awards Site
As an annex to the Academy's website, Oscar.com is the website maintained specifically for the latest edition of the awards ceremony hence, it is currently the "official home of the 72nd Academy Awards," with photos, fashion commentary, behind the scenes coverage, interviews with winners, and the like. The information per winner is particularly well-structured, offering (if applicable) short credits, the acceptance speech, a film synopsis and links to the interview with the winner, and to the other nominated films in the same category. The site includes RealPlayer streaming video of the awards ceremony and of interviews.
8.2.3 More on the Oscars
For more information about the Oscars, you can try Wesley Lovell The Oscar Guy (www.geocities.com/Hollywood/3713), a site which offers complete lists of winners and nominees, predictions of winners of the upcoming edition, an extensive discussion board, obituaries of inportant actors and directors, and so on. The review section of this site is somewhat uneven, in that some films are reviewed only very shortly and others very extensively. There are inevitably a lot of gaps, but the time span covered is very broad, going from 1902 up to the present.
Returning once more to The Greatest Films website (www.filmsite.org),
this site equally gives the full lists (directly accessible at www.filmsite.org/oscars.html
which is, then, frameless), but interestingly adds a section with films
that were or were not nominated, but did not, at any rate, receive an Oscar
even though they merited one (www.filmsite.org/noawards.html).
8.2.4 The Hollywood Foreign Press Association The Golden Globe Awards
The Golden Globe awards ceremony, dubbed 'Hollywood's Best Party', has as its online annex a searchable database of winners and nominees in separate categories from 1944 up to the present and not much more: no further information on winners and nominees, nor on the event.
8.2.5 European Awards
For a look at some of the European film awards, you can visit the French César page at http://www.ecran-noir.com/evenements/prix/cesar, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts page at www.bafta.org or even the European counterpart to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: the European Film Academy (www.europeanfilmacademy.org), which offers with its European Film Awards a welcome reversal in its focus on European films, and its 'non-European' odd-one-out award, which went to David Lynch's The Straight Story in 1999.
8.2.6 More Awards at Yahoo
http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Movies_and_Film/Awards/
This Yahoo directory offers lots of links to more Oscars
sites, but also to less familiar awards in the film industry.
9 Film Music
9.1.1 SoundtrackNet / filmmusic.com
Beautiful and easy to browse website with all the necessary information on soundtracks, plus in-depth reviews, a large number of interviews and an extensive database of composers, giving some biographical data and the composer's filmography.
9.1.2 MovieMusic.com
User reviews, track listings, some audio files (in mp3 format), messageboards, and the indispensable site search engine.
9.1.3 Film Music on the Web
Film Music on the Web offers not only soundtrack reviews (sometimes more than one per soundtrack), but also book reviews, general articles on film music, a few composer profiles, a message board, and so on. The site is on the slow side.
9.1.4 Movie Soundtracks on MovieTunes
http://movietunes.hollywood.com/movietunes/1,1366,,00.html
Soundtracks with sound clips available in most common
formats (RealAudio, Windows Media, QuickTime, mp3). There is room for reviews,
but this is probably not the best site to look for them, considering the
fact that none was available for an important film as American Beauty.
Similarly, some of the composer profiles are well-wrought, but a single
line giving birth date and place is surely on the lean side for Ennio Morricone.
10 Miscellaneous
10.1 Psychostudio
www.saulbass.co.uk/psychostudio
Play Hitchcock and direct your own version of the Psycho shower scene.
10.2 The Movie Clichés List
The list of stereotypes and clichés at www.moviecliches.com will make you stop and think about the wide spread of these hackneyed patterns. Some of the typical ways-things-work in films are even unlikely in the 'real' world out there. In the injuries section, for instance, it is noted that heroes with bloody noses stop bleeding almost immediately, and that people hit on the head do not normally throw up in a film, whereas they may well do so in real life.