UK Film Releases

I like watching films. I’ve been a member of the Clapham Picturehouse for about ten years and I like to get there a few times a month.

But I’m not very organised in my cinema-going. I never really seem to have much of an idea about what films are being released in the coming weeks. This means that sometimes I get taken by surprise when three or four films I want to see all open in the same week.

So I decided that if I had a better view of what is coming up, then I’d be better able to plan my visits. And that sent me looking for an iCal feed of upcoming UK film releases. But I was surprised to find that no such thing existed. Or, at least, if it did, it was very well hidden. I found a couple of RSS feeds on filmdates.co.uk, but they omitted the most important information – the date the film was going to be released.

After an unproductive couple of hours trying to track down an existing feed, I decided that I was just going to have to build one myself. So that’s what I did.

The iCal feed itself is at http://dave.org.uk/ukfilmrel.ics and I’ve also built a page that presents the information in a more easy to understand format. Currently, the data comes from a text file that I created by hand from just going through the latest copy of Empire. Hopefully I’ll find a better source for this information at some point in the future.

I thought it would be a two-hour job. But (as is usually the way) it took a bit longer than that and I ended up having to learn rather more about iCal than I thought I would. If you’re interested, you can find the code on Github.

If you find it useful, please let me know.