Cinephiles of the world, try Pocket Movie. You have nothing to lose but your newspaper listings!

Pocket Movie is a useful mobile app for your Nokia device. It offers a worldwide listing of movie show times. Plug in a city anywhere in the world – or even a neighbourhood within a city – and Pocket Movie shows you which movies are playing, at which theatres, and at what times.

Pocket Movie also offers short movie plot summaries and movie ratings. There are also links to trailer videos on YouTube, which you view using your Nokia device’s web browser. And you can invite your friends via links to Twitter and Facebook, which also launch your Nokia device’s web browser.

Because you can search any location, Pocket Movie is great for travellers. For example, let’s say I’m flying to Paris for business. What movies are playing tonight in the French capital? Pocket Movie knows, including the running times, subtitles or dubbing (if any), and show times:

To learn more about a particular movie, tap it, and up comes a plot summary (here, in French, bien sûr!), along with venue information (name, address, telephone number), a link to the movie trailer on YouTube, and social networking links:

Of course, most big cities have many movie theatres. So to speed your selection, Pocket Movie lets you refine your search by specifying a particular neighbourhood within a city. For example, here I have selected Manhattan’s Upper West Side:

Neighbourhood searches work even if you leave out the name of the city or state. For example, when I searched on just ‘Park Slope’ – my neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York — I still got accurate results. That was true even though I did not include either ‘Brooklyn’ or ‘New York’ in my search terms.

You can also do a kind of reverse search. Instead of searching a city or neighbourhood, you first find a movie you want to see, then discover where it is playing at a theatre near you. To do this, you first select the star icon along the bottom of the screen. This brings up a list entitled ‘Playing in your local movie theatres’:

From this list, you find a movie you want to see by scrolling and reading. Then you select the movie to see where it is playing, and when:

I found Pocket Movie to be impressively complete. I did searches for Paris, New York, Berlin, London, and Buenos Aires – and Pocket Movie delivered results for all. (It was stumped by Hong Kong, however.) I also searched some fairly small towns, including Red Bank, New Jersey, and Keswick, U.K. Again, Pocket Movie delivered the goods.

Also, Pocket Movie searches are *not* case-sensitive, so you needn’t fuss about lower-case and upper-case letters. The app is even able to guess your intention when you misspell a city name. I tested this by intentionally misspelling ‘New York’, transposing the E and W in ‘New’ like so: ‘Nwe York’. I also tried misspelling ‘Paris’ like so: ‘Parsi’. In both cases, Pocket Movie delivered the same results it did when I spelled the city’s name correctly. I give that feature four stars!

On my wish list to make Pocket Movie even more useful: A ‘history’ list that would let you review your previous searches. Currently, if you want to review your search, you can’t; instead, you simply have to redo the same search. Another cool feature would be a ‘buy tickets’ button that links to a movie theatre’s ticket-buying website. Finally, it would be great if the app could include more information about specific movies; for example, a movie’s leading actors, director, and release date.

Pocket Movie is published by i2 tecnologia of Brazil, and it is available in Ovi Store for $0.99 (USD).