Cinema: The Year's Best

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AMERICAN GRAFFITI. Small-town adolescence in 1962, perceptively rendered by George Lucas.

AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON. Yasujiro Ozu's last film, made in 1963: a serene, masterly speculation on the encroachments of age.

DAY FOR NIGHT. A sly, shrewd billet-doux to the giddy excesses of film making and film makers from François Truffaut.

DON'T LOOK NOW. Guilt and psychic phenomena haunt a waking nightmare, wonderfully directed by Nicolas Roeg and acted by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.

LAST TANGO IN PARIS and THE SPIDER'S STRATAGEM. One overpraised but still important, the other too little seen. Together they establish Bernardo Bertolucci as a significant cinematic force.

LOVE. A poignant Hungarian film about death and renewal, directed by Karoly Makk, with a lovely and complex performance by Mari Torocsik.

MEAN STREETS. Martin Scorsese's kinetic memoir of growing up in New York's Little Italy. A movie with perspective, compassion, some good actors (Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel) and a lot of street smarts.

O LUCKY MAN! Lindsay Anderson's jaunty morality play, a sort of vaudeville Pilgrim's Progress with ironic commentary provided by Alan Price's smashing musical score.

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID. A strange, severe, beautiful Western directed by Sam Peckinpah.

PULP. Michael Caine and—yes —Mickey Rooney are superb in Mike Hodges' high-spirited thriller, which spoofs the mystery genre as Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye was supposed to but didn't.