The Year's Best

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. Redford-Hoffman as Woodward-Bernstein break the Watergate story in Alan J. Pakula's superbly atmospheric, intelligently controlled film that manages at once to be raffish, slightly paranoiac and politically acute.

BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS. Robert Altman's shaggy dog meditation on celebrity and how it befuddles its victims. The ending is flawed, but Paul Newman (as the title showman) and a fine supporting cast make the journey to it highly rewarding.

CARRIE. The banal and the supernatural frighteningly, yet touchingly, juxtaposed in Director Brian De Palma's tale of how the high school prom went all wrong. Sissy Spacek is spooky as the strangely gifted heroine.

FACE TO FACE. Liv Ullmann has never been more brilliant than she is in Ingmar Bergman's latest exploration of a woman driven to the edge of madness by dreams, memories and the routine terrors of middle-class life in our times.

THE MARQUISE OF O . . . Director Eric Rohmer's coolly ironic historical romance about a woman who first mistakes a man for an angel, then for a devil, but finally learns he is just . . . a man. A delicate morality play that is also a send-up of melodramatic conventions, it is very likely the best of the best--and surely the wittiest.

OBSESSION. De Palma again--this time in a romantic mood. The story of a man given a chance to reclaim a love he thought irretrievably lost and to expiate a dreadful guilt--strains credulity. But the director's fluid technique and his gift for ravishing imagery--underscored by the lush music of the late Bernard Herrmann--sweep aside any tendency to disbelieve.

THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. Clint EaStwood directs and stars in a self-consciously classic western, in which bloody circumstances turn a peaceable man into a vengeful killer. He carries his grudge over many years and half a continent before he can lay his ghosts to rest. Josey Wales recalls just how satisfying this once great popular form can be.

SMALL CHANGE. Franc,ois Truffaut's loving, lyrical and often surprisingly funny tribute to the spunky spirit of childhood--the movie is also a reminder that if it is to survive, it sometimes needs a little help from adults who can remember what being a kid was like.

SEVEN BEAUTIES. A born survivor's natural talents are put to the ultimate test by World War II in Lina Wertmuller's hard-charging, shrilly-pitched black comedy. Giancarlo Giannini is sulphurously splendid as the small-time crook who finds the great world as much a slum as the Naples back streets where he was born. His energy--and the director's--propel one compulsively through the movie's several stomach-churning moments.

UNE PARTIE DE PLAISIR. Claude Chabrol's devastating study of a common-law marriage breaking up, with particular attention paid to the problems of self-absorption and the childishness of the male ego. Psychologically shrewd, dramatically stunning, it is a masterful cautionary tale.

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