Empire Movie Guide – Review

Our rating:

By: Bauer Corporate Services

Version #: 1.01

Date Released: 2010-01-07

Developer: Bauer Media

Price: 0.00

User Rating:

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Imagine having every movie review published by leading British film magazine Empire since its inception more than two decades ago stored in your iPhone ready to be accessed anytime, anywhere. Wouldn’t that be great? Then imagine that instead of being a mere folder in your Mail app containing all the reviews that you might have painstakingly copied and pasted from Empire Online, the repository in question is in fact a native application with an interface that is familiar and easy to use. Pretty neat, huh? Now imagine having to pony up five dollars in order to install the application on your device. Isn’t that a little too much, you ask? Well, yes and no. It all depends on whether you consider yourself a cinephile who loves reading Empire’s well written and wonderfully insightful film analyses.

For an app that promises to hold all of Empire’s database of movie reviews, you’d expect the Empire Movie Guide to "weigh" perhaps at least 50 MB. But no, upon purchase the app is just less than 9 MB in size, which makes for a relatively faster install tact time and enables you to download it directly from your iPhone’s App Store without the need for a Wi-Fi connection. At first launch, a considerable amount of time is dedicated to populating the app’s local database. At least 9,000 articles are supposedly stored on the app, and with the app’s major selling point being its complete availability even when you have no active Internet connection, it’s no wonder it’s valued at a relatively higher price point. Succeeding launches of the app will download new film reviews, if any, from Empire’s server, in order to keep it up-to-date.

In terms of its interface, the Empire Movie Guide is reminiscent of the stock iPod app, with its familiar presentation of lists and tabs. By default, the bottom toolbar includes the tabs for Latest, Movies, Favorites, Directors, and More, where the following categories are initially hidden: Actors, Writers, Genres and Released. The Latest category shows a list of Empire’s recently reviewed films, which you can sort by date, by title, or by star rating. Movies contains a complete list of all films reviewed, also sortable by title or by rating. Favorites lists the titles of the films whose reviews you have favorited in-app. Directors, Actors, and Writers each presents an alphabetical list of directors, actors, and writers, respectively, whose works have been reviewed by the magazine. Finally, Genres and Released categorize the films in the Empire database by genre and year of theatrical release. The toolbar is, of course, reconfigurable, in the same way you would edit the toolbar on the iPod app.

Tapping on a title on any list will bring up the corresponding review page. When viewed on portrait mode, the review page is composed of a top block containing the film’s title, its star rating, year of release, and director, as well as a musical note button to purchase the movie on iTunes, a curved arrow button to share the review via Twitter, Facebook or e-mail, and a heart button to add the review to your Favorites list. Below this block is the article itself, which contains several cast and crew details and a short synopsis, followed by the review proper, which, in true Empire fashion, is invariably full of depth and British bite. An Explore button is also provided at the top-right corner of the screen, giving you access to the lists of titles related to the film on hand by genre, director, actor, screenwriter, and release date. When viewed on landscape mode, though, the entire real estate of the iPhone is occupied by the review alone. I find the landscape orientation ideal for reading as it slightly magnifies the text and temporarily gets rid of the top block and navigation buttons.

Except for Favorites, each category has a search bar at the top of its corresponding list. The search function comes in handy when you want to look up a film or a particular work by a director, actor, or writer, but it tends to be slow in returning results. More often than not, scrolling to a title or a name seems like the faster way to go. The Favorites section has no search bar, but you can arrange the list manually. I’d like to be able to also sort the list by title or by star rating, though.

The app lacks a couple of bells and whistles that would have been great to have, like a way to browse lists a la Cover Flow, showing movie posters or portraits of filmmakers. Movie stills and trailers would be great additions as well, even if they’d require an Internet connection to be viewed within the app. As the Empire Movie Guide stands, though, I say $4.99 is a fair price to pay, considering its usability and the offline availability of its articles, which are among the best film reviews written by professional critics today–and in the past twenty years.