Writer and director Terrence Malick made a big splash with his first two films, Badlands (1973) and, a few years later, Days of Heaven (1978), both highly acclaimed.
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Then he disappeared from moviemaking for many years, heightening his mystique, before returning in 1998 with the star-studded war movie The Thin Red Line. It too received much acclaim, though I wonder if some of this was a "welcome back" reaction, and some criticised its length and parade of cameos (many stars wanted to work with Malick and some ended up on the cutting-room floor).
In 2005 he made The New World, which received reviews ranging from the ecstatic to the mixed, and five years later The Tree of Life won the Palm d'Or at Cannes. As with other Malick films, it's poetic with brilliant cinematography but can seem a bit long, obscure and emotionally distant.
Since then Malick films have become relatively regular and the reviews more mixed: he seems to have gone from a revered, mysterious figure to just another filmmaker, albeit one with an impressive track record. His latest film, A Hidden Life, has come into cinemas with many positive international reviews but little fanfare here.
Stanley Kubrick was another figure with mystique but, although there were often several years between films, he never went away. In some ways he is comparable to Malick as a respected maker of well-made films that are sometimes a little emotionally remote. Many, if not most, of his films are regarded as classics though some, like The Shining and his last, Eyes Wide Shut, weren't always enthusiastically received on their initial release.
Then there are the directors who only made one film. Many are cheapies or actors trying something new, but some make you wish the filmmaker had had more chances. Charles Laughton with The Night of the Hunter and Leonard Kastle with The Honeymoon Killers are two who come to mind: a 100 per cent success rate.
Woody Allen is a filmmaker with the opposite problem: he's too prolific. Allen is lucky in that he has long had the backing to make a film pretty much every year. But he doesn't seem to have considered whether that's what he should be doing. In the 1970s and '80s, Allen was fairly consistent in quality as he developed, first making relatively broad comedies like Sleeper, then making a successful venture into romantic comedy with Annie Hall and going on to make Ingmar Bergmanesque dramas like Interiors, bittersweet comedies such as The Purple Rose of Cairo and the mockudocumentary Zelig. The frequent success and variety continued in the 1990s with everything from broad comedy (Bullets Over Broadway) to darker films such as Deconstructing Harry.
But by the 2000s, despite some successes like the atypical thriller Match Point and the comedy Midnight in Paris, he was making more duds than successes, including Hollywood Ending. An Allen film was no longer something that could be keenly anticipated. Maybe he was just churning things out without enough quality control.
Other prolific and talented filmmakers have had hits and misses - Sidney Lumet is one - and whether several years between productions matters is up for debate: if the time is spent in productive development, it can help.
