Consistency is a more problematic virtue in the arts than in other fields of endeavor. Persistent, adequate similarity of accomplishment is soon enough uninvolving and irritating. Even genre literature and movies are widely expected to offer some measure of invention and variation, and Claude Chabrol doesn’t offer us generic work, even if he shares an all-too-typically French admiration for American suspense movies.

In an age when movie titles are often so bland that I find myself driving past mallplex marquees struggling to remember if I’ve seen some of the movies advertised, the title of Beerfest is a masterpiece of concision. It may not tell you everything you need to know, but it certainly helps you put it in your mental IN or OUT basket. While it’s not impossible that it could be the title for a documentary about, say, the rising popularity of microbrews in the US, the addition of an “R” rating lets you rest assured that this is not going to be a movie for the Merchant-Ivory crowd.