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Next up in my review-athon (what? Did you miss my Twitter clients review? Two makes an -athon!) is a look at the local movie finding apps. I’m just looking at the free ones, there’s at least one pay one, but the free does what I want so I don’t feel the urge to look elsewhere, y’know?

So the three I found and loaded up are BoxOffice, Movies.app and Showtimes. For me the choice is easy, BoxOffice is the clear winner – it does it all, it slices, it dices and it shows you Rotten Tomato review numbers. The other two don’t make it. I’ve been using the Fandango iPhone site, but BoxOffice is better (although it does send you to Fandango to actually purchase the tickets, which I am totally ok with).

The Basics

There’s a couple things I want to be able to do with a phone app. I want to be able to look for a movie by its title and by theater. I want to be able to see showtimes and purchase tickets. This is the baseline, if it doesn’t have these, I may as well just be using the Fandango iPhone site.

BoxOffice does this very well. It’s location aware so it’ll figure out where you are if you like, so if you’re not home, no worries. You can also always manually enter your zip code – which is convenient if you’re trying to plan something somewhere else in advance. It then finds all the movies and theaters within a radius of you (that you pick). Easy scrolling through the list by title or rating or nearness. Clicking into a theater shows you the theater info plus all the movies and showtimes. Clicking into a movie gives you a (very) short synopsis and showtimes at the theater (or theaters). Purchasing is easy, it shows you all the available showtimes (sometimes for tomorrow if it’s late enough). It doesn’t seem to offer a way to change to a completely different day, but I’m ok with that since if I’m on the iPhone it’s most likely I’m looking for something pretty close to now. And as I said, ordering tickets will send you to Fandango. And of course there’s a link to Google maps to find out where the theater is. Perfect.

Movies.app isn’t location aware but it has a very nice interface where you enter the zip code, choose the date and then pick whether you want to look by title or theater. It presents a very text oriented interface that isn’t necessarily the prettiest, but it is fast and very usable. You navigate similarly to BoxOffice, but when you’re in a movie listing it also provides links to watch the trailer (takes you to youtube) or go to the IMDB page in safari. Buying tickets takes you to movietickets.com, which I haven’t used, but seems reasonable (if dead ugly). This also has an easy link to Google maps for the theater.

Showtimes is another location aware app, but it gives you no means to set your location. So if you’re planning on being somewhere else, you’re out of luck with this app. It only presents you a list of theaters near you and then a listing of showtimes. There’s no mechanism to buy tickets or really get any other information. It’s quite disappointing, especially given the other two apps. There’s a premium version, but this free one didn’t really entice me to want more. It does, though, provide a link to Google maps for the theater.

Miscellanea

Box office has a nice feature that when you’re looking at the Title view, next to each title is it’s Rotten Tomatoes in a fresh tomato or a splat for easy scanning. You can even sort by rating. In the theater view it groups theaters into “Reallllly close by”, “<1 mile away", "<2 miles away", etc... which is quite nice. And it provides nice navigation, where if you're looking at showtimes for a particular movie at a particular theater, it's one click away to see all theaters in your range showing that movie. The only thing I wish it added was an actual link to the Rotten Tomatoes website - I think a lot of developers try to minimize the amount of application switching, which is reasonable, but I find the RT ratings a tease - sometimes I want to see what people said and am a little annoyed when I can't.

Movies.app does that nice bit where you can select, today, tomorrow or the day after for movie listings. BoxOffice doesn't have that, but again, I'm not so sure just how often I'd use that. And lastly it also offers an "Opening Soon" tab with summaries of upcoming movies. Again, a nice feature, but not one I think I'd particularly use.

Showtimes doesn't offer much, but it does slap two ads on top.

Conclusion

For me there’s no contest, BoxOffice with it’s RT ratings, easy navigation and comprehensive functionality give it the win. The only real thing it’s missing is links to the trailer like Movies.app provides. Not a huge deal, but definitely it’d be something nice to have. Movies.app is a close second and if those trailers are a big part of your process it might be the one for you. Showtimes trails far in the rear with barely any functionality to speak of and a couple ads to add insult to injury. These apps let you browse much faster than the Fandango iPhone site, so are a good upgrade. Since they’re free, what’ve you got to lose? Did I miss any? Which have you been using?