Google Movies (http://www.google.com/movies) has become even less useful than before.

As far as I remember, they used to aggregate ratings and reviews from various websites. Now, very few movies have ratings (only from IMDb) and I can't find reviews anymore.

I heard that local is strategic for Google, but this kind of change shouldn't help.

Google Movies doesn't even have the showtimes for my local cinemas anymore. And when I follow Henry's link (above), the default location is set to London and the top two entries are annotated "Not showing movies".

So yes, the service has gone downhill. But hardly anyone knows about it anyway.

On the other hand, if I do a regular Google search for movies my_town then I get a nice OneBox with the local showtimes.

The OneBox still works, fortunately.

I've always preferred to use Google Movies to alternatives, because it has no pop-ups, flash or video ads. It was perfect for finding movie showtimes near your location.

It's a real shame they give up with this service. I'm sure it didn't require significant resources, and it provide an awesome showcase of the perfect Google product: simple and informative.

Google is facing some rough challenges these days, with privacy issues (cf. DuckDuckGo threads in HN), (alleged) least effort to fight content farms, and their repeated failures to deliver a good social experience on the Web, I think they're ruining all their opportunities with decisions like killing Movie Showtime (even though it's only used by fanboys), testing banners in Gmail, censoring P2P-related queries, etc.

I still believe some influential Googlers will blow the whistle and make sure the company return to its roots, but it's getting late.