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If a lifelong pattern holds true, it will only be in 2017 that the great reviews start pouring for Nicolas Roeg’s latest film Puffball.

Logically speaking, any filmmaker who manages to crank out a new feature-length movie at the ripe old age of 78 should receive some sort of exemption from being critically savaged. Perhaps a gentleman’s agreement that if a reviewer does not like the film, then that reviewer should gently move on rather than attack the cinema of a twilight septuagenarian (Roeg turns 80 in August).

But of course, that’s not the world we live in, and so when Puffball screened last fall at the Montreal and Toronto film festivals, critics variously described it as “surprisingly terrible,” “sludge,” “a misshapen whatsit” and “atrophied and arthritisized.” Does this bother the auteur responsible for such films as Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Don’t Look Now? Not at all.

“It’s a strange thing with my films,” Roeg tells Ireland’s Evening Herald newspaper. “Mainly, good reviews have come about ten years after the films are made.”

Who knows, perhaps a decade from now, critics will take more kindly to the use - in this adapted tale of one small village woman’s cursed pregnancy (Kelly Reilly) - of a “Cervix cam,” which attempts to show the male orgasm from the point of view of the lead character’s insides. Puffball, which was filmed in Ireland, is scheduled to open in that country July 18th.