Some filmmakers, like Chaplin and Kubrick, determined that they should release a film only every few years, to make it more like an event to be anticipated. Other filmmakers work faster and harder in an effort not to be forgotten, like Spike Lee or Woody Allen. It's difficult to determine which method is more effective, but it seems like if a filmmaker turns in over fifty films of mostly high quality, their work is eventually taken for granted. Everyone loves Hitchcock now, but in 1976 when his final film opened, he must have seemed like a relic compared to Rocky and Taxi Driver. That's how I imagine Claude Chabrol today. Now 77, he releases a movie a year, more or less, and passed the fifty-film marker some time ago. Unlike his French New Wave colleagues, he didn't make a single masterpiece in his youth, and so has nothing to live up to. Rather, he's consistently reliable and skillful, and it's difficult to judge any one of his films up against another. Look through reviews of his most recent films, and for each one you'll find at least one person claiming it's his best film in years.

And so comes A Girl Cut in Two, which recently screened at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. I loved it. It's another superbly-made, highly enjoyable Chabrol film, but you probably won't see it on any top ten lists, nor will Chabrol be collecting any awards for it. I think "consistent" is a bad word among film people; we're more easily impressed by change and diversity, or by the newest, latest thing. Actors like John Wayne were routinely overlooked in favor of actors like Marlon Brando, though Brando could never in a million years have pulled off what John Wayne accomplished in The Searchers. Brando could do lots of things, but John Wayne was the best at being John Wayne. That's my standard rant, and that's how I feel about Chabrol. Now, onto the new film:

With the rise of cheap digital video, some might claim that we're in a Golden Age of documentaries, except for the fact that most documentary filmmakers aren't really filmmakers. They copy a basic template over and over again, assembling footage rather than making a movie. Of course, some of this may qualify as great journalism: the 2003 film Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, for example, or last year's No End in Sight. But very few understand how to combine filmmaking and reporting, how to make the story speak on a personal level. For my money, then, Errol Morris is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. As his reputation has risen -- he went from a guy who couldn't get arrested at the Oscars to a guy who actually won one -- his films have become more like events, like a story you can't possibly miss from a reporter you know and trust. (He has become like a Walter Cronkite or an Edward R. Murrow of the documentary set.)

Morris' Standard Operating Procedure screened this week at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where Morris received the festival's Persistence of Vision award. The new film can be seen as the third in a trilogy of Morris' war films, with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) taking on World War II and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) examining Vietnam. This one stumbles right into the current war in Iraq, and stares right into the face of the Abu Ghraib prison controversy. Of course, this story was extensively covered on the TV news and people have already seen the gruesome photographs, but Morris slows down the story a bit, taking a more careful look after the fact (many of his interview subjects have finished serving their jail time).

If nothing else, Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon raises many interesting questions about the nature of the auteur theory and film canons in general. Rohmer is a certified auteur, and a world master. He has made many, many good films and a few great ones, especially when adding entries to his three celebrated series: "Six Moral Tales" (in the 1960s and 1970s), "Comedies and Proverbs" (six films in the 1980s) and "Tales of the Four Seasons" (in the 1990s).

These films, which often have a relaxed, al fresco quality, mainly focus on young, smart, attractive contemporary French people who talk a lot get themselves into romantic situations. When he departs from this successful formula, as with his last two films, The Lady and the Duke (2001) and Triple Agent (2004), the results are considerably less. So when a filmmaker like Rohmer makes something as blatantly, painfully awful as The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, it brings such ideas into sharp relief.

Though the Dogme 95 movement caused something of a stir in the film community at the time, the films made under its banner were, to put it mildly, a bit downbeat. Only Lone Scherfig's Italian for Beginners (2002) could lift the fog. Scherfig had a talent for presenting depressing characters in a lighthearted way, and still managed to resolve everyone's problems by the end of the film.

Her film was a Hollywood ensemble comedy wrapped up in an enjoyable, intelligent art house package. As a result, it grossed over $4 million; the second highest grossing film in the series was The Celebration (1998), which made just over $1 million. None of the rest even made it that far. Working within the Dogme manifesto required Scherfig to follow ten specific rules, which included not making a period piece or genre film, using only props found on the set, using only natural sound (music must emanate naturally from the set), using hand-held cameras, natural light, no special effects, etc. The idea was that the rules would restore "truth" to cinema.

Given how well the classic song "Where Is My Mind?" worked at the end of Fight Club (1999) and given his "loudQUIETloud" (see Karina's review of the 2006 documentary) method of crafting songs, Black Francis (a.k.a. "Frank Black," a.k.a. Charles Thompson) would seem the perfect candidate to compose a fantastic new score for a classic silent film. And so an eager, sold-out crowd of fans lined up at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival for a Friday night screening of Paul Wegener and Carl Boese's silent-era, German Expressionist horror film The Golem (1920), hoping for just that. Francis -- deliberately billed with his Pixies-era stage name -- set up underneath the screen at the Castro Theater with his seven-man band (strings, horns, keyboards, etc.) and started the proceedings with a blast of guitar (the "loud" portion of the evening).

Surprisingly, Francis' raspy, yowling vocals also emitted from the darkness; he has composed an album of songs to go with the film, rather than a traditional score. The trouble is that they don't always seem to go. The effect is rather like synching Pink Floyd to The Wizard of Oz. Sometimes some magical cohesion happens between image and music, but most times the two forms are battling for your attention. The most distracting thing of all was a snarky commentator/narrator whose job was to make fun of the film between songs. ("There has to be a 12-step program for this!") At least once he spoke over the film's intertitles, and so viewers were forced to choose between trying to read or listen.

For some mysterious reason, Catherine Breillat's newest film, The Last Mistress, was chosen as the Opening Night Feature for the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. It's probably the same mysterious reason that caused most critics to praise Breillat's intolerable Fat Girl (2001). It's a reason I'll never understand. I usually love filmmakers who tackle their personal demons in film, but Breillat is different in several ways. She's a nutcase who doesn't admit to her personal demons so much as she tries to analyze them (self-analysis is always a bad idea). She raises the intellectual (or pretentiousness) level of her films rather than wallowing bodily in anything (her films have lots of sex, but it's cold and judgmental). And through it all, her films seem to have a kind of punishing contempt for everyone, her characters, critics and audience included.

However, The Last Mistress is the most enjoyable of the three Breillat films I've seen. It works on a gut level of sexual turmoil that her other films never approach, although I suspect that most of the film's success lies more with star Asia Argento than with Breillat. Argento is the exact opposite of someone like Breillat; she's a corporeal creature, a lithe force of nature. You can't even really call what she does acting. It's more like she explodes onscreen in a shitstorm of lust, blood, and unspeakable emotions made flesh. Her first appearance has her lying invitingly horizontal on a couch, and you envy the pillows. Director and actress have a meeting of minds in only one scene, the most purely Breillat-ian scene in the film: Argento leaps upon the bloody body of her lover, licks the blood out of his gunshot wounds and rises, sneering and screaming with the red, hot liquid dribbling down her chin. It's not exactly the bloody tampon teabag image from Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (2004), but it'll do.

Lust, Caution is a great festival film; it's lush and long and loaded. It's also a bad festival film; I want to go back to it and think about it more, as if it were too delicate or intricate to be understood with the snap judgments and quick appraisals a festival can make you turn to at first resort. Like director Ang Lee's prior film, Brokeback Mountain, Lust, Caution takes a brisk, brief short story (Se, Jei by Eileen Chang) and makes it fill the screen, with plenty of room for visual rapture and strong performances -- and some space for doubts and questions to seep in, with a distant whisper of controversy about sex (for the R-rated Brokeback, over gay themes and characters; for the NC-17-rated Lust, over explicit straight sex) at the edge of hearing.

In wartime Shanghai, Mrs. Mak (Tang Wei) enters a parlor and travels to another world. She plays Mah-Jong with idle, wealthy women (who live in constant danger, in the middle of squalor) and slowly, carefully, carries out the steps in a plan to meet her lover, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) -- husband to Mrs. Yee (Joan Chen), collaborator in service to the occupying Japanese, torturer. But Mrs. Mak's actions don't speak in the warm close whispers of a lover, but rather in the brittle conspiratorial tones of a criminal. ...

Because she is not Mrs. Mak; she is Wong Chia Chi, and she has been on a four-year journey to meet with Mr. Yee and be his lover. Until some later point, when he can be killed. Lust, Caution revolves around a plot, like a thriller, and we try to read it like that; but it also revolves around character and nature, like a drama, and we see it through that perspective. The movie -- and the audience -- jumps from intimate drama to glossy thrills.

The singer Edith Piaf (1915-1963) was a unique soul, as beloved in France as much as, say, Elvis Presley was in the U.S. She had an unusual stage presence, almost mousy and withdrawn, but forceful in her voice; the effect was one of breaking out of her shell, and audiences connected with her. Her haunting voice is probably familiar to many Americans, as her songs continue to turn up as atmosphere in American movies, everything from Bull Durham (1988) to Saving Private Ryan (1998), Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003) to 2005's Valiant. She appeared in person in a few movies as well, notably Jean Renoir's French Cancan (1954). My favorite Edith Piaf moment comes in Babe: Pig in the City (1998), when Babe accidentally destroys Mickey Rooney's magic show, setting the stage aflame in slow motion to the tune of "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien."

Like many artists who have touched the souls of millions, Piaf probably deserves a good movie about her life, and someone worthy of playing her. The latter has stepped up, in the form of actress Marion Cotillard, in the new film La Vie en rose. Cotillard has thus far appeared without much fanfare in Tim Burton's Big Fish (2003), Luc Besson's Taxi films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement (2004) and Ridley Scott's A Good Year (2006). But here she gives a vigorous, demanding performance that runs the gamut. She plays a teenager all the way up to Piaf's decrepit mid-40s (during which she looked like she was in her 70s). She captures Piaf's rawness and awkwardness, and refines it as time passes. She doesn't sing (Jil Aigrot provides the singing voice) but she throws her words to the rafters as if she were singing. Unless I miss my guess, the Academy will remember this performance come next February.

In 1984, Christopher Guest and company refined and co-opted the "mockumentary" genre, and for over 20 years others have tried and failed to copy it. Some forgettable examples include Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), The Big Tease (2000) and Confetti (2006). Last year Sacha Baron Cohen finally did it with Borat, but that's another story; if Guest's troupe stamped their handprints on the mockumentary, then that goes triple for the "mock-rockumentary." No one, not even Cohen, can crawl out from under the shadow of This Is Spinal Tap. At this point, it's like re-doing Citizen Kane.

For his directorial debut, American-born Hong Kong movie star Daniel Wu decided to make a documentary about a terrible boy band, but rather than tread upon sacred Spinal Tap territory, he and three friends actually formed a terrible boy band, recorded music and went on tour to conjure up material for this film. Of the four members, Wu, Conroy Chan, Andrew Lin and Terence Yin, none could dance and only one, Yin, could sing (he had a short-lived career as a pop star in Taiwan).

Thanks to the rise of digital video and the increase in box office, documentaries have become far more plentiful in recent years. In some ways that's a good thing; it means more worldly, educated moviegoers walking around. But it's also a bad thing for anyone who has to see more than a half dozen over a year's time. You start to notice the exact same techniques employed: talking heads, archival clips, filmed photographs, perhaps a narrator, and perhaps -- if we're lucky -- some actual new motion picture footage exposed just for the project.

Public television (not to mention Humphrey Jennings and his World War II-era industrials) years ago defined the format and rhythms for documentaries, and most filmmakers slavishly follow them, even if it flies in the face of their subject matter. I've seen documentaries on groundbreaking, and even indefinable artists such as John Cage and Syd Barrett filmed in exactly this same format. You'd think that the filmmakers would get inspired by their subjects and break out of the routine. Even more frustrating was the recent doc An Unreasonable Man, which told the story of Ralph Nader, and used Ralph Nader as one of a series of talking heads -- in his own movie. If the filmmakers had access to Nader, why not actually utilize him?