CurzonUk

A simple gem to pull cinemas and performances from the Vista API behind the Curzon website and spit out useful formatted info.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'curzon_uk'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install curzon_uk

The gem conforms to the API set down in the cinebase gem, andycroll/cinebase, which provides a lot of useful base vocabulary and repetitive code for this series of cinema focussed gems.

Performance titles are sanitized as much as possible, removing years, Curzon's DocHouse and Film Club strand prefixes, festival prefixes and other markers.

Every API call needs the public guest token the Curzon website gives each visitor. Fetch one before anything else:

CurzonUk.acquire_token!
CurzonUk::Cinema.all

This shells out to curl-impersonate, not ordinary system curl, using its Chrome 150 TLS/HTTP profile, and reads window.initialData.api.authToken from https://www.curzon.com/. No browser or JavaScript execution is needed.

Platform-specific gem packages include the pinned curl-impersonate 2.2.3 executable for glibc Linux (x86-64, ARM64) and macOS (Intel, Apple Silicon). On other platforms, or when installing from Git, install a curl-impersonate release yourself and put it on your PATH or pass its path:

CurzonUk.acquire_token!(curl: '/opt/curl-impersonate/curl-impersonate')

Or supply your own current guest JWT, without the Bearer prefix:

CurzonUk.token = ENV.fetch('CURZON_TOKEN')

Tokens currently last 12 hours. The gem checks the declared expiry but does not verify the signature. Missing, expired or rejected tokens raise CurzonUk::AuthenticationError; call CurzonUk.acquire_token! again. Normal API calls never acquire or renew a token automatically.

Cinema ids are Vista site ids, such as 'SOH1' for Soho.

CurzonUk::Cinema.all
#=> [<CurzonUk::Cinema ...>, <CurzonUk::Cinema ...>, ...]

cinema = CurzonUk::Cinema.new('SOH1')
#=> <CurzonUk::Cinema ...>

cinema.adr
#=> {
  street_address:   '99 Shaftesbury Avenue',
  extended_address: nil,
  locality:         'London',
  region:           nil,
  postal_code:      'W1D 5DY',
  country_name:     'United Kingdom'
}

cinema.brand
#=> 'Curzon'

cinema.full_name
#=> 'Curzon Soho'

cinema.url
#=> 'https://www.curzon.com/venues/soho/'

Performance.at returns performances for an inclusive range of business dates, defaulting to today in London and the following 13 days. It makes one request per day.

CurzonUk::Performance.at('SOH1', from: Date.today, to: Date.today + 2)
#=> [<CurzonUk::Performance ...>, <CurzonUk::Performance ...>, ...]

performance = CurzonUk::Performance.at('SOH1').first
#=> <CurzonUk::Performance ...>

performance.film_name
#=> 'Fatherland'

performance.film_year
#=> nil # from the title, e.g. 2026 for 'Street Fighter (2026)'

performance.dimension
#=> '2d'

performance.variant
#=> ['q&a']

performance.subtitled?
#=> false # true for open captioned screenings

performance.festival
#=> nil # e.g. #<data Cinebase::Festival name="UKJFF", year=2026>

performance.starting_at
#=> 2026-10-23 10:00:00 UTC

performance.booking_url
#=> 'https://www.curzon.com/ticketing/seats/?showtimeId=SOH1-57865'

performance.cinema_name
#=> 'Soho'

performance.cinema_id
#=> 'SOH1'

Variants are baby, q&a and subtitled. Curzon doesn't tag audio languages, so language is always nil.

bundle exec rake          # unit tests against fixtures
bundle exec rake live     # live API, needs curl-impersonate or CURZON_TOKEN

Fixtures in test/fixtures/api are hand-written: invented films and addresses in the shape of Vista responses, never recorded API output. test/support/api_shapes.rb describes the fields the gem reads. The unit suite checks the fixtures against it and the live suite checks real responses, held only in memory. When the API changes, update the shape first, then the fixtures.

Bump the version, merge, then run the Release Gem workflow in GitHub Actions. It builds the source and four platform gems, publishes them through RubyGems trusted publishing (no MFA code needed) and tags the release. Versions already on RubyGems are skipped, so a failed run can be rerun.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request