It isn’t necessary to have seen anything by Jean-Marie Straub and the late Daniele Huillet to appreciate this sublime and often hilarious 2001 account of their editing a film together. (Even so, it’s a pity the 1999 film they’re editing, Sicilia!, isn’t being shown as well.) This quarrelsome, loving, eccentric couple and director Pedro Costa are avant-gardists with an unusually keen understanding of so-called classical cinema (Chaplin, Ford, Hawks, Mizoguchi, Ozu), and this becomes clear in Straub’s monologues, Huillet’s precise cuts (which we observe in detail), and Costa’s beautiful way of capturing them both. Australian film critic Adrian Martin calls this probably the best documentary of any kind he has ever seen; it’s certainly the best film ever made about editing. Thierry Lounas codirected. In French and Italian with subtitles. 104 min. (JR)