The Year's Best

AMARCORD. A great movie. Federico Fellini's autobiographical fantasy about growing up in the seaside town of Rimini is lavish, pungent, full to bursting with the kind of encompassing, consuming affection for people that is the property of the true poet.

ANTONIA: A PORTRAIT OF THE WOMAN. A loving record of the life of Antonia Brico, a symphony conductor scarred but not humbled by the problem of being a woman and an artist in America. This beautifully fashioned documentary by Jill Godmilow and Judy Collins never bows to rhetoric or pity.

BADLANDS. The affectless, antiseptic world of two young killers delineated with hard skill by Director-Writer Terrence Malick. A chilly, forbidding work that catches currents of casual violence which seem typically American.

CHINATOWN. The year's most skilled and elegant Hollywood entertainment. A Los Angeles private eye (sardonically played by Jack Nicholson) stumbles into a slough of personal and political corruption. The movie is a lambent caution about the dread but immutable uses of wealth and power.

THE CONVERSATION. Francis Coppola's remarkable and moving study of an electronic surveillance expert (wonderfully acted by Gene Hackman) and his inadvertent, frightening implication in a crime. The movie also concerns rituals of ruptured privacy, and has a prevailing urgency which moves it past mere topicality.

THE GODFATHER, PART II. Final proof that sequels can be better than originals. The questionable glories and bitter defeats of the Corleone family, brilliantly acted and told with a breadth of ambition and intensity characteristic of the work of Francis Coppola, for whom this has been a prodigious year.

THE LITTLE THEATER OF JEAN RENOIR. A wise and mellow coda in three parts by one of the old masters of world cinema. Each episode is rendered in a style that evokes a period in Renoir's past work and comments on it with grace and wit.

THE SEDUCTION OF MiMi. Lina Wertmuller demonstrates that it is possible to make a movie about political ideas without being didactic. Wertmuller is fleet, funny and shrewd about the vagaries of human nature that we sometimes call politics.

THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTE. A Series of surreal blackout sketches by Luis Bunuel, loosely grouped around the theme of man's perverse pleasure in paradox. Bunuel creates in this film a paradox of his own: a work that is carbolic and tonic all at once.

THE THREE MUSKETEERS. Richard Lester sends up Dumas without putting him down. Crafted with cheer and opulence, played for good humor and an occasional romantic thrill.

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