It's called Anyclip (www.anyclip.com ), and according to its own publicity, it will "empower you to find and relive any moment from any film, instantly." Imagine YouTube only geared specifically to movies. It sounded promising, but a search of the site itself, which launched on March 15 proved to be far less successful.

My suspicions were raised by the home page, which offers a column of "Featured Quotes" (in case you were wondering what film the line "My name is Inigo Montoya" came from) and a list of "Top Movie Moments" headed by scenes from "Suddenly," (the 1954 film in which Frank Sinatra plays a political assassin), "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "The Lady Vanishes" - all ubiquitous public-domain titles. Anyclip's library appeared to be suspiciously small.

I decided to test it with a clip I'd searched for in vain on YouTube, a brief scene from the 1976 drive-in film "Cannonball" in which Sylvester Stallone and Martin Scorsese make cameo appearances as gangsters sharing a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. I typed in "Sylvester Stallone and Martin Scorsese as gangsters sharing Kentucky Fried Chicken." Nothing happened.

I tried an even more obscure film, "Another Fine Mess," a 1972 comedy in which Rich Little played Richard Nixon with the voice and mannerisms of Oliver Hardy. I entered "Rich Little plays Richard Nixon." Nothing. I entered "Rich Little" in the "Any Actor" box and pulled up a list of scenes with the word "rich" in the dialogue and a list of actors that included Cleavon Little, but not Rich. I entered "Richard Nixon" and found clips from "Frost/Nixon" as well as news that the former President can be found as an actor in "The Doors" and "Good Morning Vietnam."

I entered "a guy builds a pair of wings," an obvious (I thought) reference to Robert Altman's "Brewster McCloud."  The results included scenes from "Tommy Boy," "Benjamin Button," "Gigli" and "W.," none of which appeared to feature wings. OK, I thought, I'll make it easy for you. "A guy who lives in the Astrodome builds a pair of wings." The results: "Tommy Boy," "The Life of Brian" and "Tomb Raider." Still no wings, and no indication that added the setting had helped.

At that point the site started to crash no matter what I typed, so I postponed my searches for another day.

The next day I decided to try a few more common listings. It was, coincidentally, Bernardo Bertolucci's birthday, so I entered the Italian director's name. Anyclip produced a list of two Bertolucci films - "Last Tango in Paris" and "Little Buddha," but had clips from neither.

I tried "Jerry Lewis" - it was his birthday, too - and it produced listings for Jerry Zucker, Lewis Gilbert, Lewis Allen, Lewis Milestone, Jerry Zaks and Jerry Schatzberg. (The only clips available for any of these were the trailer for Schatzberg's "Seduction of Joe Tynan," excerpts from two of Lewis Gilbert's Bond films and an assortment of scenes from Lewis Allen's best known film "Suddenly" of "Top Movie Moments" fame.)

A random search (and many crashes) through other listings revealed that there really are film clips available at AnyClip, but the selection is as limited as it is random. I found 8 pages of listings for Billy Wilder, but only a single listing for John Ford. Their list of directors included Truffaut, Fellini and Kurosawa and Raoul Walsh (no clips from any of them), but not Fassbinder, Godard, DePalma or Rossellini. (Incidentally the director's portraits are almost uniformly awful, and the one for their entry on Richard Lester - no clips available, of course - is actually a photo of Richard Donner! - I guess we know where their sympathies lie on the "Superman 2" conflict!)

I suspect that the idea behind Anyclips might actually be useful to people and that someday Netflix or IMDB or some other site with a wider view of films, access to a bigger library and a more comprehensive grasp of basic databasing skills (to say nothing of actually checking the captions of pictures after you google them...) will grab the format, work out the bugs and tie it in to their current content. As it stands right now, it falls considerably short of its "any moment, from any movie" claim. It's more like a rough draft of Flixster for the discriminating movie lover whose favorite film is "Suddenly."