If you just want to get admission to your local movie theater, chances are the Fandango iPhone app (free) has your ticket, with availability for 20,000 screens nationwide. The ticket service is also available via the company's website and a host of apps for other mobile platforms. Fandango certainly gets you in the theater door (with a small convenience fee over what you'd pay at the door), but it lacks the deeper information and social connections you'll find in our Editors' Choice iPhone movie app, Flixster. Nor does Fandango have Flixster's ability to view movies right on the iPhone or browse DVD offerings. Despite those limitations, Fandango is a well-designed, easy-to-use app with an integrated ticket-purchasing system that's even used by competing apps such as MovieFone and Apple Trailers.

Interface

When you first launch the app, Fandango shows you a full-screen promotion of a single movie, along with its nearest and soonest show times, based on your GPS location. That's darn convenient if it's a movie you'd like to see, but if not, you can tap the Movies and Theaters buttons for more cinematic options.

The Theaters section offers three views—In Theaters, Coming Soon, and My Movies. At the top you'll see movies opening this week, followed by movies that are now playing. Pretty soon you'll be navigating the app, and the screen will become covered with an ad. It baffles me that the app, which is trying to sell you a seat in a movie theater, would want to hinder your progress with these disruptive ads.

A simple but effective recommendation icon appears alongside each movie entry in the form of a speech bubble: It can either be a green Must Go!, a green Go, a yellow So-So, or a red No. Most movies fall into the Go category, with only a few So-Sos and very few Nos. Some films have no rating at all, since they may not have been around long enough to garner a quorum of reviews. In any case, I prefer Flixster's more granular and detailed Rotten Tomatoes ratings.