Where to watch free movies on the web? 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BestOnlineDocumentaries: As one reader previously told us, “This site is a bit out of date and some of the links are broken, but it’s still a great compilation of online documentaries.”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.

PBS Video: PBS hosts online a new film based on Michael Pollan’s bestseller, Botany of Desire. Other PBS productions are also housed here.

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

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.

Related Content:

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.

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.