Film history

Gore Vidal once sighed that ‘every time a friend succeeds, I die a little’, and there is inevitably a sense that when some idiotic blockbuster makes $1 billion worldwide, our collective intelligence loses a couple of IQ points. It’s a relief, then, when the worst examples of their kind, made at enormous cost to negligible artistic impact, flop hideously: proof that audiences will not fork out for any arrant piece of trash. The most recent high-profile failure of this kind was Todd Phillips’s bewilderingly poor Joker sequel, Folie à Deux, which insulted its audience and thus precipitated its commercial failure. If the Daily Telegraph film critic Tim Robey’s excellent study

In 2006 the director Christopher Nolan filmed an adaptation of one of my novels, written a decade and a half earlier. Other than providing the source book, I had no involvement with any part of the filming. Unlike some novelists who have a Hollywood film made, I was not at all disappointed with the result: it struck me as an intelligent, skilful and imaginative adaptation, both similar to but also subtly different from the novel. That it has since become something known as ‘Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige’ seems slightly odd from my point of view, but that’s the name of the game. Another decade and a half further along, The