Legal Research

Find Any Film

By scott

The UK Film Council has just launched a film search engine - findanyfilm.com - allowing UK film buffs to locate films legally availbale in the UK ( Note: It does not class DVDs encoded for regions outside of ‘region 2′ as being legal).

According to the site: “our aim to give you the best possible movie experience, promoting every type of film that’s available for viewing in the UK. To do this, we’re working with the UK Film Council, the Industry Trust, and exhibitors, distributors and retailers, to promote legally available films - making high-quality, legal viewing one of our top priorities. We’re also committed to becoming the UK’s most comprehensive film-watching search engine, with an ever-increasing number of titles and a wide choice of reputable retailers. We list films across every format, and if a film is not immediately available, we’ll do our best to find it for you and let you know the details as soon as possible.”

A search for the Louise Brook’s classic, Pandora’s Box returned 6 results - it seems to be a free text search, unless you go into advanced search where you can search by Title, Actor, Director, Year, Genre, Certificate, Language, or Keyword.

Not a brilliant start. Why is the 2001 film “Trois 2 - Pandora’s Box.” the number 1 result, and “Pandora’s Box” number 2. How can an exact title match be the second hit??

Clicking on Pandora’s Box, brings up a new page, providing Film viewing options: In the Cinema; On TV; On DVD; On Blu-ray; To Download; To watch Online; In Other Formats.

Where, for example, it is available on DVD, it will take you to a page listing a number of online sites, where the film can be purchased, with prices also displayed.

If the film is not available in your preferred viewing format, the service lets you sign-up for alerts on film’s, so you can be informed when they are coming to a Cinema near you, appearing on TV, coming out on DVD/Blu-Ray, or being made available via downloads or online. This is really good, although I would have hoped that this information could have been delivered by an RSS feed as well as via individual emails - which does not seem to be the case. Also, there does not seem to be an option to have a ‘page’ to visit to display/check just what films you are keeping an eye out for. The site could do with taking at look at Locate TV to pick up some pointers on that point. It does does something similar for TV and DVD, and can let you create your own ‘watch list’ page - [Although Lottie, I’d STILL like an rss feed option there too! Not going to stop asking :-)]

The alerts page also provides a list of ‘related titles’. From here, for example I can see that another fine Louise Brook’s film - Diary of a Lost Girl -  is on at The Barbican at 4pm on 22 February 2009.

I think this could turn into an excellent resource for all film buffs. Worth a look.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 28, 2009 (boomark / email).