Where to watch free movies online? Here’s a list that will get you started. We’ve listed 25 sites that feature a wide range of films. Classics, international, film noir, documentaries, indies — they’re all here, waiting to be watched. 

General Films/Movies

Internet Archive – Feature Films: When you’re looking for free movies online, the Internet Archive should be your first stop. It features large collections of comedies, film noir and sci-fi/horror flix. You will also find some foreign films here, along with important classic films, including movies by Elia Kazan, John Huston, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks and others. You can access the Archive’s full movie library here.

Australian Screen Archive: The Australian National Film and Sound Archive provides free and worldwide access to over 1,000 film and television titles – a treasure chest of down-under video 100 years in the making. Thanks Peter for that tip.

Babelgum Films: Babelgum’s goal is to act as an international ‘glue’, bringing a huge range of professional and semi-professional films to a global audience – like a modern-day Tower of Babel. They’re also making an effort to get their content to smartphones. They have an iPhone app now and apps for other phones on the horizon. Get more detail on the mobile apps here.

BestOnlineDocumentaries: As one reader previously told us, “This site is a bit out of date and some of the links are broken, but it’s still a great compilation of online documentaries.” For more documentaries, you should also see Snagfilms mentioned below.

Classic Cinema Online: This site nicely pulls together hundreds of classic films, ranging from Action to Westerns and even old cinema shorts and news reels. A good tip from Lifehacker.

Crackle.com: If you’re looking for mainstream movies, here you go. This is Sony’s online movie play. You get free films here. But my guess is that there’s some geo-blocking that comes with this. Can anyone verify? (Note: one of our readers has also suggested the UK-based Blinkbox, which seems to offer another platform for more mainstream films.)

Creative Commons: The folks who gave us the Creative Commons license host a wiki where you can find a good number of freely available films. Handy and worth keeping an eye on. I’d also suggest keeping tabs on CC’s Video blog.

Europa Film Treasures: Thanks to Europa Film Treasures, you can spend hours looking back through an archive of European film. Theses films range from “comedy to science fiction, from westerns to animation, from erotic to ethnological movies.” Highly recommended by our readers.

Film Annex: This site has one of the largest selections of online films for you to watch or download. See films from independent filmmakers and directors from all over the world, and download or stream to your PC, laptop or iPhone. The films are ad-supported. If you click here, you can watch Charlie Chaplin’s 1918 film, Shoulder Arms.

FMO: FreeMoviesOnline features a large selection of public domain films. Here, you’ll find films featuring John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire and many others.

Free Documentaries Online: The name says it all.

Free Documentaries.Org: Specializes in showing provocative documentaries for free…

Hulu: Unfortunately Hulu limits its programming to a US audience  (a policy that really needs to change), but it’s the 800 pound gorilla in the US, and there are some decent films here (see some picks here), so I’m grudgingly listing it. Sorry in advance Stephen…

IMDB: This is perhaps a little redundant, but the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) also hosts some free online films (as well as TV shows) on its site. From what I can tell, it’s done in partnership with Hulu. But this collection has the advantage of pointing you to some decent films. Click here and scroll down. You can also find another re-packager of Hulu flix over at Veoh.com.

Legal Torrents: Pretty much what the name says. Legaltorrents.com hosts high quality open-licensed (Creative Commons) digital media and art. This link takes you to their movie section.

NFB.ca: NFB.ca is a web site where you can watch films produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It offers access to 100s of documentaries, animated films and trailers. You can also access this collection via a free iPhone app.

QuickSilverScreen: This site essentially puts torrents online and lets you watch films posted by other users, including many new films. It’s hard to believe that this site is entirely kosher, but it’s very popular (one of the top 3,000 sites on the web) and hardly a closely held secret.

Sling.com: This collection contains some dreck, but also some decent documentaries and classic films. So it gets on the list.

SnagFilms: SnagFilms “finds the world’s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time filmmakers, and makes them available to a wide audience.” You can watch full-length documentary films for free. Currently includes over 550 films. And, as one reader notes, “The best part … is you can give back to the charitable foundations behind each one of the documentaries.” Among other films, you can find Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me and Naomi Wolf’s The End of America here.

Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive: This online catalog “provides access to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive. The Archive serves as a comprehensive informational and archival resource worldwide for moving image materials pertaining to the Holocaust and related aspects of World War II. ”

The Auteurs.com: Though this site typically offers arts films on a pay-per-view basis, it does feature a series of free films. Each month, a free film is featured (see example here). The site also hosts free international films restored by Martin Scorsese’s Word Cinema Foundation, mentioned right below. And you can find another set of free films here.

Video on Demand at Amazon.com: Ok, it’s not the most enriching collection of films. But if you’re looking for something light…

World Cinema Foundation: The WCF, created by Martin Scorsese in 2007, has restored a series of classic international films. You can watch them for free online.

YouTube Movies: YouTube hosts a series of full-length movies. Right now, they’re showcasing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, His Girl Friday with Cary Grant, A Farewell to Arms with Gary Cooper, and Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film, Home.  There are likely some geo-restrictions here.

YouTube Screening Room: The Screening Room presents high quality, short independent films to YouTube users and promises to roll out four new films every two weeks. The collection includes some Academy-Award winners and other quality films. More info here.

For more Free Culture, see our other major collections:

Free Courses Online

Free Audio Books

Free Language Lessons

Intelligent Video: The Top Cultural & Educational Video Sites

A quick note: Paul McCartney’s album, Memory Almost Full, is going today for $2.99 on Amazon. Supposedly, it’s just a one day deal, so it seemed worth a mention…

Not long before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan was interviewed by Charlie Rose and discussed the troubled state of scientific knowledge in America, and how it threatens our democracy. Before Richard Dawkins came along, Sagan was already out there, making the case for scientific thinking, arguing that it let us make progress and keeps our republic vital. (Whether our republic actually remains vital at this point, it’s certainly hard to say.) We need more figures like Sagan, and we particularly need the American university system to care more about public engagement — an area where it depressingly comes up short. But we’ll talk more about that at some other point. Part 1 is above. Click for Part 2 and Part 3.

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Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan Remixed

This comes to us courtesy of TED Talks. Here, Itay Talgam, an Israeli conductor, talks about the art of leading an orchestra and shows the styles of six great 20th-century conductors. Ultimately, there are some general lessons here. Lessons about leadership. Give it a few minutes, and it gets going. Meanwhile, on a related note, you might want to check out Yale’s new open course, Listening to Music, which uses classical musical to make sense of music more generally. Thanks Vickie for the great find.

Earlier this week, we highlighted Snagfilms.com in our collection “20 Places to Watch Free Movies Online.” When you dig into their collection, you will find some well known, recent films, including Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me and Naomi Wolf’s The End of America. And then you can also stumble upon some worthwhile educational documentaries. Above, we feature “Asteroids: Deadly Impact,” a National Geographic documentary that asks whether the Earth could experience another cosmic collision with an asteroid (as happened 65 million years ago), what the aftermath might look like, and whether can we do anything to prevent it. You can find more documentaries along these lines in SnagFilms’ Science and Nature Channel.

David Simon once called his HBO series, The Wire, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” Think of it as a five season, 3600 minute, artistic depiction of the escalating breakdown of urban society. The show is art. But it is also life in the biggest sense. And it’s why some thinkers have likened the epic series to (or even elevated it above) Tolstoy’s War & Peace. Now comes this… According to The Harvard Crimson, William J. Wilson, a Harvard sociology professor, will teach a new course that uses The Wire as “a case study for poverty in America,” saying that “The Wire has done more to enhance our understanding of the systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the poor than any published study.” If you haven’t seen this series, and if this whets your appetite, you can find a nice deal on Amazon. The full series now goes for $125.00, 50% off the list price.

News broke today that Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of France’s towering intellectuals, has died. He was 100 years old. The New York Times has a lengthy obit that covers the career of the anthropologist who brought us “structuralism” and helped us look at diverse cultures in new ways. NPR has also aired a short piece (in audio) that highlights Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual accomplishments. You can listen below.

Audible Starter Kit: Get 3 Audiobooks, Plus a Free Phillips Spark 2GB MP3 Player

Michael Pollan’s best-selling book, Botany of Desire, is now a film, and you can watch it online, courtesy of PBS. (Click to watch complete film.) The film takes you inside our relationship with the plant world, and shows “how four familiar species — the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato — evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control.” According to a piece in The San Francisco Chronicle, it took eight years to pull together the funding for the film, and that’s simply because marijuana was in the mix. The film runs close to two hours. The preview is above, the full film is here.

Gotta love comedy that riffs on the Large Hadron Collider. I’ll have some more serious things to say about the LHC in the coming weeks. In the meantime, enjoy the comic bit. Have a good weekend…

Nina Paley, a self-taught animator, released in 2008 an 82-minute animated film, Sita Sings the Blues, that mingles the classic Indian myth, The Ramayana, with contemporary autobiographical events, and it’s all set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. The film, which launched the San Francisco International Animation Festival, has won awards and gathered a lot of fans. In late February, Paley handed the film over to the public, releasing it under a Creative Commons license (download it here). And she has now made it available on YouTube. Hence the visually stunning film above. Naturally, we’ve added Sita Sings the Blues to our collection of YouTube favorites.

A quick note: Amazon will let you download a Philip Glass sampler that contains 21 tracks. You can get them as mp3s, and they’re all free. But the deal ends (it seems) by the end of the day. So act quickly.

via Lifehacker

When the global financial system collapsed last year, This American Life and its sister program, Planet Money (iTunes - RSS Feed - Web Site) began doing something that few others could pull off. They took very complex problems and made them understandable, often demystifying difficult concepts in a reliably engaging way. Now, they’re at it again. This time, they’re breaking down the American healthcare system and getting at the core question. Why can’t we control ever-rising healthcare costs? That’s what the raging healthcare debate is effectively all about. And, if you want to be an informed participant in the debate, it’s worth listening to these two episodes that tease things out. The first episode, called More is Less, looks at doctors, patients, insurance companies and their tangled relationship. (Click here, then scroll down and find the “Full Episode” icon.) The second episode, Someone Else’s Money, gets you inside the world of drug and insurance companies and patients. Have a listen, and thanks to Bob in Brooklyn for the tip here.

Stanford students head to the Galapagos Islands, then rap about what they’ve learned. Evolutionary rap. What a concept…

Meanwhile, the professor whose voice you hear at the outset, Bill Durham, taught a course in Stanford Continuing Studies (my day job) last year, and we have made it available as a free podcast. It’s called Darwin’s Legacy, and it brought together some of the world’s leading Darwin scholars for the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. You access and learn more about the course here.

via Stanford’s Facebook page

Back when Richard Dawkins (Oxford University) published The God Delusion in 2007, he made a fairly unexpected appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Quite the contrast in characters. Now that he has published his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, it was time for Dawkins to meet up with the bumptious one again. Here it goes. Watch above.

A quick update for you. Yale University has added its third batch of courses to its open education initiative, bringing the total number of courses to 25. (Find the complete list here.) The latest round is slightly bigger than previous ones, which bucks the trend that we’re generally seeing. (Open Courses have been in a noticeable slump for the past year.) Below, I have listed the newly added courses and provided links to iTunes, YouTube, and pages where you can download the courses in various other formats. I have also added these courses to our collection of Free Online Courses from top universities. This collection now features over 250 free courses, all ready to download to your computer or mp3 player. iPhone owners can also find many other courses on our free iPhone app.

• Dante in Translation – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Giuseppe Mazzotta
• European Civilization, 1648-1945 - iTunes – YouTube – Download Course - Professor John Merriman
• Freshman Organic Chemistry – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course - Professor J. Michael McBride
• Global Problems of Population Growth – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course - Professor Robert Wyman
• Introduction to New Testament History and Literature – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Professor Dale B. Martin
• Introduction to Theory of Literature – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Professor Paul H. Fry
• Listening to Music – Download Course – Professor Craig Wright
• Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Professor Stephen C. Stearns
• The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food – Download Course – Professor Kelly D. Brownell
• Roman Architecture – iTunes – YouTube – Download Course – Diana E. E. Kleiner

The marketing around the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s Answer to the Kindle, has begun, even though the product won’t be sold (for $259) until November. Above, you’ll find a B&N video that demos the features of the new e-book reader. Gizmodo is already giving the Nook some nice reviews. See 8 Reasons You Can Finally Love Ebook Readers (Thanks to Nook). And you can learn more about the Nook’s features over at Engadget.

No one tells a better story than This American Life, the award-winning radio program coming out of Chicago. And no one is better positioned to explain the art of great story telling than the show’s host, Ira Glass. Above, Glass gives you his thoughts. And this clip comes in 4 acts. For more, get Act 2, 3, and 4.

This little collection gives you access to Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of America’s great poets, reading his own poetry. Among the poems, you will hear “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain,” “Vacancy in the Park,” and “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” For more, you should see our previous post, Listening to Famous Poets Reading Their Own Work, and then below watch the clip below of ever-prolific Yale literature professor Harold Bloom reciting Stevens’ “Tea at the Palace of Hoon.”

Earlier this week, one of our readers, Scott Dumont, offered up some excellent thoughts on a few podcasts that we’ve previously overlooked. Since he put things so well, I figured why not pass along his thoughts directly to you. Here they go, and thanks Scott …

I’d like to make three suggestions for additions to your library. Two political podcasts and one historical one. For the political ones, you’re lacking in the more independent department; you’ve got Democracy Now, which is good enough but I’d suggest adding Common Sense with Dan Carlin (iTunes – Feed – Web Site) and My History Can Beat Up Your Politics (iTunes – Feed – Web Site). Common Sense with Dan Carlin is a true independent news show, putting the current politics in perspective and analyzing the disconnect between what is propaganda and what is truth. His description is:

Common Sense with Dan Carlin is a blend of audio commentary and news analysis by one of the leading thinkers among today’s politically independent crowd. Author, reporter and talk show host Dan Carlin takes a look at the issues in the news through the prism of his traditional American “forward-thinking pragmatism” while pushing a fiscally conservative, socially liberal approach to solving problems. Whether he’s railing against the “Fat Police”, explaining the existence of “The Chicken Little Gene” or continually bringing up historical events no one has ever heard of, Carlin manages to be entertaining and informative in a uniquely non-partisan way. His style has been compared to Seinfeld’s George Costanza on steroids. Whether that’s true or not, he does often talk really fast. You’ll have to keep up.

If I had to recommend a few from the ones currently in his feed, I’d say take a listen to the following shows before you decide: “137- A Vote For None”, “143- The Black Dog”, “146- The Continuity Of Errors”"154- A Conflict of Interest”, “157- Read It and Weep”, “161- Shhh!”. I know it’s a lot, feel free to pick any of those, but those are probably varied enough for you to get a taste of what he means.

My History Can Beat Up Your Politics is exactly what it sounds like; it puts current political events in a historical perspective and analyzes the history to allow us to understand our politics. For a good sampling, just take a look at this most recent stuff. He’s not schizophrenic like Dan Carlin and his show is fairly formulaic, but that’s not to say it’s not informative. (more…)

Back in June, we first posted a handy list of web sites where you will find free intelligent videos — documentaries, classic films, public television programs, university courses & lectures, interviews with big thinkers, etc. The collection has now grown to 50 sites. Below, you can find the first ten sites on the list, and you can check out the complete collection here. Feel free to share it with friends and, of course, tell us if we’re missing something valuable by using the comments section below.

1) ABC Documentaries: This site pulls together some of the best documentaries aired on ABC television in Australia.

3) Arkive.org: The site gathers together “the very best films and photographs of the world’s species into one centralised digital library, to create a unique audio-visual record of life on Earth.” A great site for naturalists and nature lovers.

4) Australian Screen Archive: The Australian National Film and Sound Archive provides free and worldwide access to over 1,000 film and television titles – a treasury of down-under video 100 years in the making.

5) Babelgum: Babelgum’s goal is to act as an international ‘glue’, bringing a huge range of professional and semi-professional content to a global audience – like a modern-day Tower of Babel. They’re also making an effort to get their content to smartphones. They have an iPhone app now, and apps for other phones on the horizon.

8) BigIdeas: This show, which comes out of Canada, ”offers a variety of thought-provoking topics which range across politics, culture, economics, art history, science…. The program has introduced Ontario viewers to the impressive brainpower of people like Niall Ferguson on American empire, Daniel Libeskind on architecture, Robert Fisk on the Middle East, George Steiner on the demise of literacy, Camille Paglia on aesthetic education, Tariq Ramadan on being a Western Muslim, Noam Chomsky on U.S. politics, Leon Kass on dying, Janice Stein on accountability and governance.” See the full list of videos here.

9) BigThink: “Offers high quality video interviews and insight from the world’s most influential experts in business, entertainment, education, religion and media.” BigThink was founded partly with the help of Larry Summers, formerly the president of Harvard, now Obama’s right hand economic man.

9) Bloggingheads.TV: We had several readers highly recommend bloggingheads.tv. Here is how bloggingheads has been described elsewhere: “a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers.”

9) CultureCatch: CultureCatch.com has over 160 half-hour interviews with today’s seminal artists in film, theater, music and literature.  Here you’ll find in-depth interviews with smart culture individuals dissecting art, comedy, fashion, film, music, politics, television, theater, even cooking.

10) Edge.org Video:  Edge.org is run by John Brockman, literary agent to some of the most important science writers in the US and beyond. You’ll find videos featuring these thinkers on the Edge’s web site.

See the full collection of Intelligent Video Sites here

A nice tip from Lifehacker. Canada’s National Film Board makes 1000s of films (including documentaries, animated films, trailers and some Oscar winners) freely available via the web and now the iPhone. Visit the NFB collection here, and get the free iPhone app here.

via Lifehacker

According to the LA Times, U2 will live stream its concert this coming Sunday night on YouTube. Some 95,000 people have tickets for the Rose Bowl show in LA. If you’re not one of them, then you can watch the YouTube stream starting at 8:30 pm Pacific time. The footage will also be archived for anyone who misses it. More details here and here.

In 2008, Martin Scorsese brought the Rolling Stones to film with “Shine a Light.” (Watch the trailer here.) But a good forty years before that, another giant of modern film had a similar idea. Jean-Luc Godard, one of the founders of New Wave French cinema, directed “Sympathy for the Devil” during the tumultuous summer of 1968. The film is part rockumentary, part advertisement for left-wing ideas that were alive at the time. (There’s no real way to sugarcoat that.) Above, Godard takes you inside the recording sessions of the Rolling Stones’ classic, “Sympathy for the Devil.” As the clip goes on, you can see the song, as we know it, unfold. Thanks John for the heads up on this one.

Updated post: It’s rare that we get to cover math here. So here it goes: Adrian Banner, a lecturer at Princeton, has put together a lecture series (in video) that will help students master calculus, a subject that has traditionally frustrated many students. The 24 lectures (click here and scroll down) were originally presented as review sessions for Princeton introductory calculus courses offered in 2006, and each runs about two hours. It’s worth noting that Banner has used the lectures to develop a handy book, The Calculus Lifesaver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Calculus. To find this course (and many others like it), look in our collection of Free Online Courses from Great Universities. Here you will also find MIT’s course, Single Variable Calculus, which now appears on YouTube and iTunesU.

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The Bayeux Tapestry famously offers a pictorial interpretation of the Norman Conquest of England (1066), a pivotal moment in medieval history, and the events leading to the invasion itself. Currently residing in France, the tapestry measures 20 inches by 230 feet, and you can now see an animated version of the story it narrates. The clip above starts roughly halfway through the story, with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, and concludes with the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Thanks Jason for the lead on this one. Good tips are always welcome.