Best of '88

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS Tragedy awaits, irony abounds in this memoir of friendship and betrayal in a boarding school during World War II. Without italicizing a single emotion, French director Louis Malle has created the year's strongest indictment of the totalitarian mind and the conformist soul.

BABETTE'S FEAST Cooking is a metaphor for art in Gabriel Axel's wise, deeply ironic and richly realized adaptation of Isak Dinesen's story.

BEETLEJUICE The feel-weird movie of '88. Director Tim Burton's supernatural jape features comic-book ingenuity, a swell turn by Michael Keaton as a punk demon, and a delirious calypso sound track. Day-O will never sound the same.

BIRD Charlie Parker, genius of modern jazz and modern self-destruction, is played with easy-gliding perfection by Forest Whitaker, and director Clint Eastwood re-creates his world in dark, romantic hues. No false notes, no easy sentiment.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST In an age of post-Christian facetiousness, Martin Scorsese's work daringly attempts to restore passion and melodrama to the Gospel story. Protests notwithstanding, the film is an affirmation of faith in the power of both the Gospel and the movies.

MISSISSIPPI BURNING Historical fact, the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964, triggers a fervent historical fiction. Gene Hackman is canny and powerful as an FBI agent tracking the killers in director Alan Parker's angry, headlong film.

PELLE THE CONQUEROR An old man and his son on a Danish farm: sweet, stern, elemental, grand.

THE SINGING DETECTIVE Dennis Potter's BBC serial, about a writer lacerated by memory and liberated by fantasy, was an instant cult classic on TV. Now it has barreled onto the big screen -- all 6 hr. 42 min. of singing, dancing, dazzling talking. In either format, a bloody masterpiece.

TUCKER Francis Ford Coppola restores Capraesque would-be capitalist Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) to legendary life in a funny-dreamy biography of the can-do automaker who discovered that prophets often end up without profits when they threaten the economic establishment.

WINGS OF DESIRE An angel, whose job it is to listen to the cries of human misery, falls to earth and falls in love. This astringent romantic fairy tale, from director Wim Wenders and novelist Peter Handke, imagines a West Berlin languishing in heartache and itching for spiritual redemption. It's funny too.