MOVIE REVIEWS : A Look at Feature-Length Documentary Nominees . . .

Academy Award-nominated documentary films have had one-day programs in the past, but this year marks an unprecedented departure.

Beginning Friday at the AMC Century 14 Theaters, there will be a weeklong run of all the 1987 nominees--the five in the feature-length documentary category (reviewed here) and the five in the short category (reviewed separately by Kevin Thomas). The winners will be announced April 11.

The splendid “Bridge to Freedom” marks the concluding part of the PBS “Eyes on the Prize” series produced by Henry Hampton, which records with clarity and passion the struggle for civil rights in America from 1954 to 1965. This section highlights the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., begun with such peril.

There is an accompanying book, where faces and text can be studied at leisure, but nothing comes close to the film’s feeling of being there. In a mixture of present-day interviews and unparalleled footage from the time--amazing stuff done by everyone from amateurs to network newsreel photographers--we hear those bellicose Southern voices, read the implacable body language and attitude of such men as Sheriff Jim Clark, and wonder again at the plain, bedrock heroism of those men and women, insistent on their basic rights no matter the obstacles.

The women quilt makers of “A Stitch for Time” travel a long road too, from naivete and idealism to a certain crushed sense of political reality. Beginning with a quilt sent to women in the Soviet Union in the name of peace and friendship, some Idaho women with varying degrees of political sophistication go on to create a quilt jointly with Soviet women, and further dare to hope that it can hang behind the participants at the Geneva Nuclear Disarmament talks.

It’s this last dream, warily entered into by representative Soviet quilters as well, that brings the Boise women face to face with political reality. They are suavely, almost unctuously dealt with by the U.S. delegation head, Max Kampelman, who assures them that the world is not on the brink of death or anything near it, and leaves to his aide the final, discouraging word that, of course, a Peace Quilt, made up of portraits of both Soviet and American children, is not going to hang anywhere near the negotiating table. An elevator hallway, instead, is its fate.

There are many lessons to be learned here, none of which are lost on this bright, indomitable group of women whose own strengths as clear, strong communicators grow measurably during the film by Barbara Herbich, Cyril Christo and Nigel Noble. (This quilt, incidentally, is hanging concurrently with the film’s showings at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Blvd., near the County Museum of Art.)

“Hellfire: A Journey From Hiroshima” is a portrait of Japanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki, witnesses to the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, who have spent their lives jointly creating ink-on-paper murals of that event and others of numbing significance. The two--he now 85 and she 74--have an odd style; one lays in graphic details, the other paints over them with a wash through which these tortured faces and bodies appear.

The Marukis’ other epic mural subjects have been Auschwitz, the mercury victims of Minamata, the rape of Nanking and the forced suicides of Okinawan civilians at the last major land battle of World War II. What the film does not explore is the impulse that leads to a lifetime of atrocity art, a question that needs deeper answers than film makers John Junkerman and John Dower care to supply.

“The Ten Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table” is a spritely, insightful consideration of those smart talkers--Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman, Franklin Pierce Adams, Robert Sherwood, Edna Ferber and Alexander Woollcott, et al.--who reigned as New York’s laser-wits of the 1920s. Singular talents, they began as fast friends and relatively obscure writers and ended with reputations that, in some cases, dwarfed and even paralyzed their own productivity.

Using home movies, drawings of the time (including cartoons of John Held Jr., exquisitely tinted) and dramatic re-creations of some of the group’s most notorious one-liners, the film benefits hugely from the participation of insider-narrator Heywood Hale Broun, son of columnist Heywood Broun, as well as the senior Broun’s fellow Round Tabler Marc Connelly. The adorable Connelly is the group’s droll, deadpan last survivor; he might look cherubic but it did not pay to cross wits with him. When another Round Tabler tried, saying, “I love your bald head, Marc. It feels just like my wife’s behind,” Connelly ran an appreciating hand over his pink dome and twinkled back, “Why, so it does, so it does.”

The fifth nominee, “Radio Bikini” by Robert Stone, on the effects of the United States’ 1946 nuclear test explosions on the Pacific island of Bikini, was reviewed in The Times just weeks ago by Leonard Klady, in conjunction with the film’s weekend screenings at the Monicas through Sunday. He found it “a film of quiet conviction with an underlying passion that burns our minds and souls.”

For details of the screenings, which are divided into three separate programs, call AMC theaters, (213) 273-7423.