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Nigel Andrews writes about film for the FT. - -
The losing of America
The blast of truth, giddied up with fun and fantasy, has a morbid irresistibility, writes Nigel Andrews. The new Batman epic is about America losing America, and it is the biggest opener in US filmgoing history
A tale of droid meets probe
Depleted landfills blow, like Bob Dylan’s answers, in the wind. And little Wall.E, who looks as if he might be the product of a night of passion between ET and R2D2, whirs, bleeps and compacts, writes Nigel Andrews
Apocalypse wow
Hollywood’s holocaustic imaginings make Nigel Andrews wonder: when everything material, sustaining or protective on Earth is gone, is there anything left that adds up to something?
Abba, with elemental force
That Meryl Streep’s showmanship can take control of the entire song-and-dance spectacle of ‘Mamma Mia!’ – even distracting us from director Phyllida Lloyd’s hiccupy alternation of location shots and soundstage ‘exteriors’ – is a little frightening, writes Nigel Andrews
A double dose of midsummer madness
What could be madder than a film week that twins the gloppy glitz of the newest Narnia epic with an independent film as funny, brave, cheap and pessimistic as ‘A Complete History of My Sexual Failures’, asks Nigel Andrews
Colour of love in black and white
As the dawn smog rises we realise we have spent 100 captivated minutes rollercoasting through everything we knew about first love but had been too frightened, previously, to try to remember, writes Nigel Andrews
Pulped fiction
Great books are often turned into bad films, but second-rate fiction has spawned many celebrated movies. Nigel Andrews argues that it is better to leave the classics alone
Child-napping with a twist
Ben Affleck, who directed and co-scripted ‘Gone Baby Gone’, relies on that Pavlovian response to paedophilia – as a crime from another planet rather than one all too close to home and human nature – to get the plot buzzing in early scenes, writes Nigel Andrews
The screams of fake liberation
If ‘Sex and the City’ is fun – here and there during its humungous length (two hours 20 minutes) – that’s because it is so besotted with the things its characters use to cover their gauche feints at assertive sexual freedom, writes Nigel Andrews
The school of hard knocks
How could anyone not love ‘Entre les Murs’, this year’s Golden Palm winner in Cannes? It is the best film about schoolteaching I have seen: a wise, funny cry of helplessness before the tsunami of anarchy that can be school-age adolescence, writes Nigel Andrews
