Sometimes actors try their hand at directing and the result is well-received as with Sean Penn and "Into the Wild." Then there are those thespians who should stick to their day jobs. Such is the case with Anthony Hopkins whose third film as a helmer — "Slipstream" — opens today to mixed reviews, scoring 45 at Meta Critic and only 14 from the Cream of the Crop at Rotten Tomatoes. And Alison Eastwood, daughter of Clint, making her directorial debut with "Rails and Ties," fares just as badly coming in at 44 on Meta Critic and 14 at Rotten Tomatoes.

Hopkins pulled quadruple duty on "Slipstream" - besides directing, he wrote this surreal comedy, stars as the screenwriter whose characters come to life, and composed the score. The only critic of note who saw value in all of this hard work was Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times who thought, "Hopkins does an impressive job of creating the kind of dream-drug-reverie state people can go through."

While Eastwood restricted herself to just helming her film, critics were indifferent to this standard fare melodrama about a couple (Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden) coming to terms with a tragedy. As Manohla Dargis writes in the New York Times, "The film is so self-consciously unadorned, so humble and plain, that it feels as if its director didn’t want us to think that she was trying to make some kind of cinematic statement. She hasn’t. Though she serves her actors well enough and sometimes even better than that, her grasp of the medium and its expressivity is less sure."