Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie?

If you’re scrambling to find a movie listing, the iPhone can tap that data anywhere. And instead of Safari, a handful of stand-alone apps do the job better, with interfaces designed for the mobile searching. We compared Movies, Now Playing, OneTap Movies, and Showtimes to see which gives the most movie information while still being simple to use.

Unfortunately, none of these tools includes our Milk Duds-and-popcorn perfect combination of features. With the iPhone knowing its location, we want to look at a map that shows all of the nearby theaters together. Instead, every app bounces you to a single theater’s location in the Maps app. Or why not see a map view of nearby listings for a single movie, not just theaters?

While missing that ideal, the free app, Now Playing, served us best. While Movies identified the location of more obscure art-house and university theaters in our tests, most lacked showtime details. Now Playing displayed all of our local art-house favorites but also listed showtimes. And with trailers, links to multiple reviews, and the ability to purchase tickets, Now Playing covers all of the important basics.

Movies earns a fairly close second place, but OneTap Movies and Showtimes—the free version of OneTap Movies--round out the bottom. Those two apps even miss necessities, like an alphabetical listing of current movies. Instead, you can only browse by release date or box-office take.