At one time, Moviefone was the hottest way to find movie showtimes. It was so hot in the 90s that Seinfeld even made fun of it in an episode (embed below). Sadly, now run by AOL, its website is a cluttered mess. I don’t know about you, but when I visit it, I expect to find a way to easily find movie showtimes. I don’t care about the latest celebrity gossip, nor do I want to see all this behind the scenes stuff. Just movie showtimes, please.
That’s what a new site, ShowtimeFu offers. And it’s so much better than Moviefone You simply visit the site, put in your city (or it may remember it if you’ve been there before), and you get a full listing of every movie playing around you, at what time, and at what theater.
On the left side navigation, you can deselect certain movies, as well as rule out theaters. You can also deselect certain ratings, and filter the time. In the main column, you simply have a list of the movies and the showtimes. If you click on one you’re interested in, it loads a new page in this main column which contains a description of the movie (along with links to its IMDb and Rotten Tomato pages), a map of where the theater showing it is, and the play times (including a beginning and end time).
Unfortunately, one thing you cannot do is purchase tickets from the site. But it seems like that would be an easy enough feature to add. And to be honest, I never buy tickets over the web anyway, I just want the showtimes then head to the theater to get the actual tickets. So this option is perfect for me.
I long ago gave up on Moviefone. Fandango is slightly better in terms of easy access to movie times, but it’s even more cluttered. Recently, to find movie times, I’ve been using Google Search with queries like “movies ZIP CODE”. But that leave a bit to be desired if I do actually want to know a little more about the movie.
ShowtimeFu is a simple site, that won’t lead to any Seinfeld spoofs (that would be hard considering the show has been off the air for a decade), but it works — at least when I’m at my computer, otherwise there are plenty of good iPhone apps for finding movie times.
