The Year's Best

ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. All about a middle-aged widow and her smart-mouthed son trying to make a new life for themselves. Directed with raucous, stops-out vitality by Martin Scorsese and fiercely well acted by Ellen Burstyn, Diane Ladd and Harvey Keitel.

BARRY LYNDON. One of Stanley Kubrick's most audacious excursions, about a rake's progress and comeuppance. The movie is stunningly beautiful and bleakly--sometimes madly--funny. Though the pace is deliberately slow and careful, Barry Lyndon is finally an exciting film because Kubrick's gift for poetic irony charges every scene.

JAWS. The great white shark brought in $150 million, promoted a lot of jokes about ocean swimming and made, not incidentally, a vastly entertaining thriller directed by Steven Spielberg.

JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL. Claude Chabrol's carbolic comedy about murder among the upper classes and the insupportable burden of forgiveness.

THE MAGIC FLUTE. Mozart and Ingmar Bergman: a combination made somewhere in the higher celestial regions. An ebullient and quite ravishing version of Mozart's morality tale that is part recreation, part reinterpretation.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. See previous page.

NASHVILLE. Robert Altman's rhinestone epic of contemporary America, told with casual, muted force through the lives of a couple of dozen stars and hopefuls in the country-music capital.

THE PASSENGER. A thriller that is also a cipher about a journalist (Jack Nicholson) who swaps identities with a dead man. Michelangelo Antonioni's film is full of dead-end romanticism and voluptuous mystery.

TOMMY. Ken Russell has taken The Who's rock opera and used it as the basis for an outrageously funny and vulgar assault on the excesses of pop culture.

THE WIND AND THE LION. A grand, wistful adventure, directed and written by John Milius, concerning the last of the Barbary pirates (Sean Connery). The movie is made affectionately in the mold of such larger-than-life romances as Drums and Four Feathers.

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