Best of '87

! BROADCAST NEWS In James L. Brooks' wickedly nice comedy, the devil (William Hurt) is an anchorman, and a charming one too. Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks shine in this delectable All About Eve for the infotainment age.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN A boy loses his parents and becomes a man: corrupt, scheming, desperate to survive at any cost. This is a Steven Spielberg movie? Yes: an anti-E.T., and his most mature, beautifully crafted fable about childhood.

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM In Saigon, 1965, the war sneaks up on Disk Jockey Robin Williams, darkening and then silencing his mad-lib monologues. This high comedy from Director Barry Levinson is 1987's deftest evocation of Viet Nam's surrealism.

INNERSPACE Sci-fi satires may finally be B.O. poison, but Director Joe Dante knows how to send the genre out (and up) in a blaze of tangled plots, visual bravura and comic-book savvy.

JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON OF THE SPRING Forget Wall Street. For a really savage study of greed and relentless connivance, see Claude Berri's double- decker movie. His tale of fate-haunted French peasants is also that movie rarity: tragedy on the grand and classic scale.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE Like Broadway's Into the Woods, William Goldman's script throws an open-house party for fairy-tale heroes, villains and a beyond- gorgeous princess (Robin Wright). Revisionist fun for the whole family.

RADIO DAYS Woody Allen recalls the power of a mass medium and a messy family in shaping a child's imagination. This memory play is also a rueful reflection on the ways time's passage both diminishes and enhances that power.

RAISING ARIZONA Nathan Arizona Jr., that is -- the infant kidnaped by a young couple who are aching to be parents. In this wonderfully bizarre romantic comedy, Auteurs Joel and Ethan Coen prove themselves Young Hollywood's last best hope.

TAMPOPO An Eastern western: the cowboy is a truck driver, his homestead is a Japanese noodle restaurant. Writer-Director Juzo Itami offers a free-range meditation on how gourmet fads deliriously distort man's second favorite drive.

THE UNTOUCHABLES Director Brian De Palma and Writer David Mamet reimagine the gangster epic and create a witty, bloody, touching commentary on two vanished traditions: Hollywood dreammaking and American innocence.