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Discovr Movies (for iPad)

Discovr is a decent iPad app for discovering new movies, but it's badly limited by the inability to search by actor and director names.

November 28, 2012

It's Friday night and you're in the mood for a flick—what to do? You can comb through your Blu-Ray or DVD stacks, or hope that Netflix serves up a relevant recommendation (good luck). If you have an handy, however, you can fire up Discovr, a $0.99 iOS app that serves up film titles based on genre. It's a fine idea in theory, but the product is quite bare bones in practice.

Booting up Discovr brings you to a minimalist gray screen that has a search engine near the center with "Favorites," "In Cinemas," and "Our Pick" tabs at the bottom. It's a very simple design that serves two purposes: Easy navigation and keeping the focus on the movie recommendations.

At The Movies
Tapping "In Cinema" reveals movies that are currently playing in theaters such as Wuthering Heights and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II (two movies playing at the time of this writing). Tapping the Twilight film icon, for example, opens an interactive map that showcases other movies related by genre and/or actor such as Snow White and the Huntsmen, Red Riding Hood, and the other marvelous Twilight movies. Tapping any of the new icons pulls up additional recommendations based on that flick. I like this discovery method more than Netflix', where my recommendations are suddenly flooded with Star Trek if I watch just one episode of The Next Generation. It's fun to see how quickly you can go from a quality flick like Blade Runner to not-so-quality flicks like Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go To College (note: it's seven). "Our Picks" is where you'll find the likes of Aliens, The Dark Knight, and other popular films.

Double-tapping a movie icon gives users related movies info such as rating, release year, runtime, genre, plot synopsis, Rotten Tomatoes review scores, actor list, trailers, and links to places where you can view or purchase the flick (iTunes, Netflix). You can save a movie entry to "Favorites" by tapping the heart icon. This only saves the movie's recommendation list—not the actual film details—to "Favorites."

Alternately, you can use the search box to search for movies by title, but it's extremely limited. You can search by movie title, but not by actor or director. That's a huge oversight, especially for movie fans who want to see other works by their favorite artists. What's currently there is not enough.

It's a So-So Showing
Discovr is a simple method to discover new films—perhaps too much so. Some will decry spending $0.99 on an app that essentially serves as a movie database. That's a fair criticism—there's a great free one online—IMDB. Discovr desperately needs to provide users more functionality—actor and director search are the obvious needed additions. Still, if you want an interesting way to discover new movies, Discovr's not a bad choice.

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