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THE GROUP IMAGE: A MOUTH IN THE CLOUDS (Community). This is the first recording by the Manhattan hippie tribe that has been turning on with sound and light in a couple of off-Broadway ballrooms; it will soon open its own permanent ballroom in the East Village. The five-man band has a driving, express-train beat, and a sharp and shimmering harmony, and a high voltage singer named Sheila. Their sound is all their own, but there are some familiar touches of The Lovin' Spoonful (Grew Up All Wrong) and Jefferson Airplane (Banana Split). In Banana Split, two electronic zaps project the listener, as through a time warp, into a liquid Eden of tinkling bells and clicking percussion. The Group Image calls it the Twinkie Zone, and it's a pretty good place to be.

CINEMA

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. The enigma of man's place in the cosmos is the theme of Director Stanley Kubrick's technically dazzling epic of the space age.

WEEKEND. Jean-Luc Godard's savage attack on bourgeois society opens with satirical brilliance, then degenerates into dreary political rhetoric.

FUNNY GIRL. A sentimental musical biography of Fanny Brice, custom-made for the brassy, sometimes brazen talents of Leading Lady Barbra Streisand.

THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES. The film adaptation of Frank D. Gilroy's play about familial agony in The Bronx is brought to life by the honest, homely acting of Patricia Neal, Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen.

ROMEO AND JULIET. Franco Zeffirelli turns one of Shakespeare's most familiar plays into a movie of stunning immediacy. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, as the passionate, star-crossed lovers, perform with a maturity beyond their years.

WARRENDALE. This magnificent Canadian documentary by Allan King movingly depicts the troubled lives of a small group of emotionally disturbed children.

THE BOFORS GUN. Life in the postwar British army is the subject of this vigorously antimilitary drama. David Warner and Nicol Williamson offer two of the best screen performances of the year.

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. Alan Arkin's magnificent performance as the mute in this Hollywood adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel is the only real glimmer of poetry in an otherwise determinedly prosaic film.

VOYAGE OF SILENCE. A deceptively simple story of a young Portuguese carpenter emigrating to Paris is given uncommon strength and stature by the compassionate observation of Director Christian de Chalonge.

RACHEL, RACHEL. Actor Paul Newman makes his debut as director in a quiet tale of a frustrated schoolteacher just entering middle age. His wife. Actress Joanne Woodward, gives the film an added stature with her achingly real portrayal of the heroine.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE PUBLIC IMAGE, by Muriel Spark. The author is out to tease, tantalize and teach, and she succeeds in doing all three in this story of a movie star who must decide between private truth and public life.

EVA TROUT, by Elizabeth Bowen. This is a rare commodity on today's fiction market: a novel of sensibility. The story is about a wandering, capricious heiress in whose wake many lives bob helplessly.