Find Film Clips Fast

Launched in beta in December, the free Movieclips service features 12,000 classic film excerpts — from It’s a Wonderful Life to The Big Lebowski. Search by actor (”Jeff”), director (”Coen”), keyword (”Big”), or line of dialog to call up the snippet you seek (”Where’s the money, Lebowski?”). In the mood for the full flick? Movieclips directs you to other sites to download, rent, or buy. One really cool feature is that you can simply place your cursor over a clip shown on the home page to play it instantly on your screen.

If you have more esoteric tastes, turn to Anyclip (also free and currently in beta). Founded in March 2009, the site went live with 20 public-domain films in January; it will launch another 300 titles, mostly indies, at South by Southwest in March. Anyclip uses a scene-by-scene indexing system, and a crowdsourced video-editing option lets users cut clips themselves or add additional search tags to improve the service.