The movie clocked in just $11.6m£5.9m9m) and reached fourth place in the chart, when it was expected to earn at least $20m£10m0m) and open at number one - like he directors' latest efforts, Kill Bill Volume 2 and Sin City, did.
In the winter months, Bartlett Sher's take on "Roméo et Juliette and Mary Zimmermann's on "Rusalka" had cloudy stretches, but they improved on the directors' prior efforts at the Met.
Even though sound is the best weapon available to them, the directors make efforts to elevate "Shut Up" beyond a traditional concert film: interview segments with the journalist Chuck Klosterman, footage of Mr. Murphy in and around his apartment the morning after the show.
An article on Wednesday about an Afghan-American film director's efforts to shoot a feature film in Afghanistan reported that the director, Sonia Nassery Cole, said she took the leading role in her film after the actress she had cast had her feet cut off by militants.
Conway was a classic example of a talented director whose efforts were subsumed by the studio system.
Thierry Frémaux, the festival's artistic director, said efforts had been made to open the festival to every candidate.
There's still fire in their hearts, despite the director's efforts to douse it with caramel.
In the mid-1960's, J. Edgar Hoover, then the F.B.I. director, blocked efforts by his agents based in Birmingham to prosecute Mr. Blanton, Mr. Cherry and two other Klansmen, Robert Chambliss and Herman Cash.
Most of the director's efforts, in any case, seem to have gone into the script; even the moments of visual excitement and invention seem more crafted in advance than seen.
Young readers are able to conjure an entire fictional world so vividly inside their heads that a film director's efforts at translation can seem redundant, or even worse.
