Rather than going to a Web site that lists local movies and showtimes, you can find out when a theater near you is playing a movie in one quick and easy step in Google.

The syntax for this is movie: followed by the movie name and your city name and state or zip code. Do put spaces in between the words. Capitalization doesn't matter. For instance, you could find local listings of Return of the King in Seattle by searching for:

movie: return of the king seattle, wa

Note: Google is not forgiving with the spelling of movie names. You must spell the movie exactly the way it appears, although you can leave off words Google usually ignores, such as "a" or "the." The same search would work as:

movie: return king 98101

Not only does Google list showtimes in theaters near that location, if there are any, it also shows you average movie reviews. You can click on the rating to the left to see more specific reviews pulled from various professional review sources.

Click on the map link next to a movie theater to open Google Maps and find driving directions to the movie. Click on the name of the theater to see all movies that are playing at that theater, plus reviews of those movies.

Next time you want to see a movie, just use Google and find out when your movie is playing, whether it's worth seeing, and what else is playing instead. It's faster than finding listings in the newspaper.