Ok, $MOVIES doesn't contain the necessary information, so the problem is before the awk to $MOVIETITLE

$MOVIE immediately after the beginning of the for loop contains only the ID and the movie name up to the first word Angels.

The next time it passes through the loop it continues from where it left off, producing invalid results where the $MOVIE var contains only an ampersand

$TRAILERS does contain everything as I expected it to be. The ID, full movie title that already appears to have the ampersand converted from an html entity, date and the rest of the info, for every movie in the XML file.

I'm at least as stuff as I was originally though, having no idea why $MOVIE doesn't contain what I'd expect it to (the full contents of a single "row").