If Claude Chabrol isn’t the most gifted or admired of the French film artists of the late-1950s Nouvelle Vague who set out—often in collaboration with each other—to reconceive French cinema and impose a new aesthetic regime, his career’s longevity and productivity are among the very most impressive. He is still releasing films on a yearly basis and they’re generally getting wide distribution in France and at least limited release in this country: His newest, A Comedy of Power, is his 57th feature (not counting television work) in less than 50 years.

“Who the fuck is Jackson Pollock?” is what San Bernadino trailer park resident Teri Horton asked when a shopper pointed out that the oversized canvas she had at her garage sale might be a lost work by the famed American painter. A hard-bitten trucker with an eighth-grade education, Horton had purchased the painting at a junk shop (for $5, arguing the clerk down from $8) as a joke gift to cheer up a friend, who laughed at it and refused to let it in her house. With tastes that run more to Norman Rockwell than abstract expressionism, she was astonished to learn that the painting that “We were gonna throw darts at” could be worth as much as $50 million. All she had to do was prove that it was an authentic Pollock—a task far easier said than done, as this hugely entertaining documentary by 60 Minutes producer Harry Moses demonstrates. Aided and funded by her son, a garage owner, Horton quickly runs afoul of Manhattan art cognoscenti who aren’t about to have their opinions revised by an “outsider.” Even when respected forensics experts prove, to levels acceptable in any court of law, that Pollock worked on the painting (the evidence includes a fingerprint), they merely sniff that it doesn’t look like a Pollock to them. Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? succeeds on several levels: as a mystery, a lesson in art history and a comedy with a twinge of bitterness demonstrating that the class system in America is not going away anytime soon.

You can only get so much juice out of one lemon, and the one known as Hannibal Lecter has pretty much been squeezed dry. Eager for a way to get more money out of the world’s favorite cannibalistic serial killer, producer Dino De Laurentiis persuaded author Thomas Harris to devise another movie presenting his origins. It’s an interesting idea given the way the character has taken on a life of his own—he began as only a minor character in Harris’ 1981 novel Red Dragon, so working backward could serve to fill in Hannibal in a way that Harris had never given thought to before. Given Hannibal’s already established origins as an Eastern European born in between the wars, the possibilities are fascinating: Imagine him as the scion of deposed aristocrats, inbred royalty, or as a product of Fascist excesses—perhaps one of the children in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sadean Salo? No such luck. In the well-trodden path of movie monsters turned into avenging angels for the box office, Hannibal Rising presents the young Lecter as a boy whose family is killed by renegade sub-Nazis in 1941. Eventually making his way to France and the care of his late uncle’s wife (Chinese star Gong Li, once again, as in Memoirs of a Geisha, cast as a Japanese), he studies medicine and sets out for revenge. A brief glimmer that the movie might be intended as a study in the corrupting effects of vengeance quickly disappears in the face of bad guys so evil that you feel no compunction in watching Hannibal slaughter them. The leader of these is played by an unrecognizable Rhys Ifans, better known as comical goofballs in films like Human Nature. Perhaps fighting against his natural tendencies he delivers an overwrought performance, though one that pales next to that of Gaspard Ulliel in the title role. He looks less like Anthony Hopkins than Crispin Glover, and overacts as much as the two of them combined. Filmed primarily in Lithuania and the Czech Republic, where great production values come cheap, it’s a handsome-looking film, all high contrast and desaturated colors. (The director is Peter Webber, and the links to his memorable Girl with a Pearl Earring are all visual). But its appeal is only to diehard horror buffs, who may be disappointed to find it less gruesome than the standard set in recent years by producer Michael Bey’s torture-soaked remakes of 1970s movies like The Hills Have Eyes and The Hitcher.