A mini-review of two contending film/cinema listings applications for iPhone: Showtimes and Movies. Which should you put in pride of place on your home page?
Showtimes
Showtimes finds your location via location services, lists the five nearest cinemas (that’s all it lists here, anyway), and displays film titles and show times for each. The app links the address of a chosen cinema to the iPhone’s Google Maps app and gives you directions from your current location via GPS, so it’s handy if you’re in unfamiliar territory. Clicking on a film title takes you to a brief IMDB description, and a YouTube trailer. You can scroll through days beyond today’s date to get times for future showings.
You can alternatively view films by Most Popular, Rating, and Newest, rather than via the listings of what’s on at your nearest five cinemas. There’s also the option to manually select a location other than your current one to see what’s on at more distant cinemas, or to just enter a post code instead of using location services at all.
Pros: Stable, slick, integrates nicely with GPS, Google Maps and YouTube trailers.
Cons: Only seems to locate the big chains – I’ve never seen a little ‘art house’ cinema appear in the listings.
Movies
Movies also finds your current location through location services. It lists far more cinemas than Showtimes – 16 at my current location, including independent or ‘art house’ cinemas. You can add any of these to a favourites list for quicker access. You can only view today’s show times, and have to go into the Options screen to change the day: you’ll then be able to see show times for that day only.
Like Showtimes, it links into Google Maps/ GPS and YouTube trailers, but unlike Showtimes it provides more detailed links to IMDB and other film review sites (which take you out of the app), and provides a cinema contact number (which takes you back to the app after you’ve ended the call).
Movies has various other features, but most of them – like Box Office, what’s opening this week, Upcoming, and DVD releases – are only aimed at the US market: obviously, release dates and other information are different for the UK. There’s an online booking facility, but this also doesn’t work in the UK.
Pros: Greater range and number of available cinemas and review material, and the app gives you the cinema’s phone number as a press-to-dial. Lot of additional features…
Cons: …which for the most part are only relevant to the US (or to Region DVD 1 releases, if that’s your bag). It’s also a pain having to go into the options screen to choose each day’s show times.
Conclusion
Both the apps are free, and both offer far better, quicker, and more enjoyable ways of checking what’s on at the cinema than fumbling through sites on a web browser. Movies offers a greater range of features, but Showtimes has a far slicker interface and is quicker to scroll through information – especially on different dates – than Movies.
However, the latter is, for now, the only app that bothers to offer information on the independent cinemas around here, so on that point alone Movies has to get the recommendation for best iPhone film/cinema listings app – in the UK, at least. You should be aware that, as with many iPhone apps, updates are quite frequently being made available. For now, it might be worth installing both and seeing how they develop.
