The Internet Movie Database provides much of the same information as the Cinemania CD- Rom and it's more up to date, often listing films that haven't even been released yet.
The main site is at:
The U.S. Mississippi mirror is at:
http://us.imdb.com/
Mirror sites contain exactly the same information but the sites are physically closer and are useful when you encounter Internet "busy signals" when you try and access the more popular sites.
As you travel to this site, you will be greeted by three buttons that allow you to search films by name, title and character name. The beauty of The Internet Movie Database is that you set the parameters and it does the work for you.
The Movie Database is an international volunteer effort. The objective of the database is to provide useful and up to date movie information freely available on-line, across as many systems and platforms as possible. It currently covers over 32,000 movies with over 390,000 filmography entries and is expanding continuously.
The database includes filmographies for actors, directors, writers, composers, cinematographers, editors, production designers, costume designers and producers; plot summaries; character names; movie ratings; year of release; running times; movie trivia; quotes; goofs; soundtracks; personal trivia and Academy Award information. Several thousand movies are covered completely from the major actors to the minor bit players.
CMD is searchable not just as a WWW interface but via even more powerful parameters. The most frequently requested searches are: information on a particular movie; or person, filmographies of everyone associated with a movie, movies associated with a person, directors, movies released in a particular year, movies starring a combination of two actors, persons who have played a particular character, dates when people were born/died, and, on a more limited basis, how to contact actors via agents' addresses.
Users are able to vote and rank their favourite movies. The results are compiled and displayed when the page is accessed.
If you search for the name of actors or actresses, you will be give a list of all known films or television titles that they have done. Web pages offers easy point and clicking, so if you mouse on to one credit, you will be given the film's title, year produced and all the other known credits associated with that film.
As comprehensive as the database sounds, there are many gaps in the information presented. Most information is on the celebrities of the film world: actors, actresses, writers, and directors, with the rest of the production crew given short shrift. The compilers are aware of this and have installed instructions on how to request documents that explain how to make additional entries or corrections.