Richard Attenborough is 84 and Jacques Rivette will be 80 in March. Each has had an incalculable influence on cinema in his respective country and both are still making pictures with an enthusiasm that is enviable in the extreme. But while Rivette continues to explore the boundaries of his medium, Lord Dickie is content to tell tales in an old-fashioned manner that owes more to matinee melodrama than cinematic ingenuity.

Closing the Ring is Attenborough's first release in a decade. With its shifting time frames and discussion of secrets, lies and regrets, it's solidly crafted and earnestly played. But, for all its worthiness, this is rather dull and squanders any goodwill one may feel towards it with a shamelessly contrived denouement.

The action switches between small-town Michigan girl Mischa Barton and the trio of wartime pilots obsessed with her and Belfast teenager Martin McCann, who becomes interested in her story after discovering the wreckage of a B-17 bomber in the Black Mountains in the early 1990s. Linking the strands is Shirley MacLaine, who has just buried the husband she reluctantly married after her flyboy beau was killed in action and risks alienating daughter Neve Campbell by her callous attitude towards his memory.

With Pete Postlethwaite, Christopher Plummer and Brenda Fricker completing the veteran cast, this has the feel of a TV-movie based on a penny dreadful. Several sequences are painfully overplayed, particularly by Plummer and Campbell, while McCann's insensitive youth is an irritant throughout. But Barton and MacLaine ably convey the dreams and disappointments that make up so many ordinary lives.

d=3,3,1Scratch most members of the nouvelle vague and you'll find traces of the so-called Tradition of Quality that they once derided in the influential journal, Cahiers du Cinéma. François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol have all made period pictures. But rather than simply pictorialising their literate scripts - as so many directors of the Chocolate Box School tend to do - they imparted an innate filmicness that ensured they were much more than mere animated radio. And Rivette again proves that heritage can be audiovisually exciting with Don't Touch the Axe.

Having tackled Balzac before in La Belle Noiseuse (1991), Rivette invests this expert adaptation of the novella La Duchesse de Langeais with the same cinematicism that he brought to his 1965 take on Diderot, La Religieuse. The screenplay, the mise-en-scène and the arch performances of Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu (as the Restoration beauty and the besotted Napoleonic general she torments) rejoice in their theatricality. But, Rivette keeps us constantly aware that we are watching a film by interspersing the action with captions that wittily comment on the temptress being outwitted by the strategist, as he answers her pricking of his boorishness with a silence that ultimately destroys her.

Rivette's respect for his text finds echo in Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, which ambitiously attempts to relocate the intense spirituality of the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955) to a modern-day Mennonite community on the outskirts of Chihuahua.

Racked with guilt because of his adulterous passion for waitress Maria Pankratz, farmer Cornelio Wall Fehr seeks advice from his mechanic friend and preacher father. But his fate seems decided when wife Miriam Toews succumbs to a broken heart.

From its opening six-minute time-lapse record of a sunrise, this is a film that demands patience, as Reygadas dwells on the routines of daily life and the insignificance of this human drama within the vast expanse of the Mexican countryside. But those prepared to accept the austere aesthetic and the minimalist performances will be rewarded by the quiet optimism of this parable on the possibility of salvation.

A very different Mexico emerges in El Violin. Expanded from an award-winning short, Francisco Vargas's debut feature is a superbly judged, neo-realist study of an ageing musician's determination to resist his oppressors during the peasant revolts of the 1970s. Driven from their village in the barren Guerrero region, one-armed farmer Don Angel Tavira, gun-running son Gerardo Taracena and trusting grandson Mario Garibaldi seek refuge with the rebels in the hills. But Tavira vows to recover the weapons cached in his cornfields and uses his musical virtuosity to win the grudging respect of sadistic army captain Dagoberto Gama, who is guarding the exclusion zone.

Martin Boege Pare's stark monochrome photography gives the story a gravitas that is trenchantly reinforced by the dignity of the non-professional cast, with 81-year-old Tavira leaving as indelible an impression as the picture's chilling climax. Perhaps we need more octogenarians making movies!