How to Search for a Movie Title?

How to search for a movie title? How to find a movie without knowing its title? What was the name of this movie? I once saw this movie and I don't remember what it was called—what could its title be? These questions serve as triggers for the following post.

There are times when, for one reason or another, we remember fragments of a film, parts of a movie—sometimes isolated, other times not. Sometimes we only remember a performance, a saying, a dialogue, an image, or an ending. On other occasions, we believe a movie starred a certain actor when it was actually another. In short, we have partial information and cannot recall the movie's name.

With the internet, the search becomes much easier. However, we often run into issues with titles: they tend to vary from the original when the film comes from another country and language, and even within the same language, variations in titles frequently exist.

Here are some tips and tricks to undertake the search and reach a successful outcome. Sometimes it takes very little time to find the title; other times, the search extends over time, and occasionally it gets so difficult that you can't seem to find it at all. As the well-known saying goes: he who seeks, finds.

1. Try to remember as much as possible related to the film. Even if they are disconnected fragments, words, phrases, dialogues, music, songs, actors, dates, characters, movie genre, etc. The more data you have, the better.

2. Start the search by narrowing down the date as much as possible to when you remember watching the movie. Was it a theatrical release? Did you see it on television? Was it at a film festival or on a special occasion?

3. Turn to movie database aggregators. The most popular and comprehensive is www.imdb.com/; there is also http://www.filmaffinity.com/, which is quite good. A search on a meta-search engine like https://www.google.com/ remains an almost indispensable resource.

4. If the search is still difficult, there is still much to do. For example, if you know the name of an actor or actress, you can dig into their biography and look under the filmography section. If you know the director's name, you can do the same and check their filmography. If you know it was a true event or the movie was based on real events, it is advisable to go to an online encyclopedia, read about the event, and check the section listing related bibliography and filmography. If you know the movie is based on a book—usually a novel—you can look up the author and that novel in an online encyclopedia; at the end of the article, it is usually mentioned whether one or more movies were made based on it.

5. It may be that the plot of the movie matches what we are looking for—we must always read film synopses—but it might not be the exact movie we want to find. They might even share the same title, meaning we could be facing a remake. Remakes are different versions of the same movie. For example, there are 5 movies made in different years that are all titled The Four Feathers, which in turn are based on a novel also called The Four Feathers. Sometimes in a remake the plot remains the same, while in others it undergoes variations, which can confuse us. There is also the case of movies that are adaptations of a literary work, or movies adapted from another movie; even though the foundation is the same, the films and their interpretations differ from one another. This can cause confusion when we are looking for one specific version and not the others. On other occasions, we might find several movies that are completely different from one another yet share the exact same title. This is another source of confusion in our search. When searching for titles, we can also get confused because sometimes a movie, a short film, a TV series, or a miniseries (a middle ground between a movie and a series, such as Shaka Zulu or Horatio Hornblower) share the same name.

6. When the situation gets complicated and the title still doesn't appear, you can use synonyms or related terms for words identifying the images you remember. For instance, if you recall a "house" in the movie, you can try "apartment," "cabin," "home," etc. If you remember a "war," you can try "conflict," "fight," "battle," etc. If the movie is of foreign origin—say, an American, Canadian, or British film—you can search using keywords in its original language. If you remember there was "snow" in the movie, search for "snow"; if you remember it took place in "summer," search for "summer," etc. That is, we use keywords in two ways: as synonyms/similar words, or in another language.

7. Another possibility is to visit forums on websites dedicated to cinema (the 7th Art). You can go there, register, and leave a message. They often have dedicated threads specifically for searching for movie titles; other times, you need to post an independent thread where you can get help from movie buffs, who usually have extensive knowledge across a wide variety of films. Two websites of this kind are http://www.cinepatas.com/ and http://www.elseptimoarte.net/, but there are many more. There are even forums not strictly about cinema where you can leave a message requesting help to find a movie title.