Video Movies : <i> Recent releases, reviewed by Times critics.</i> : **** Excellent *** Good ** Fair * Poor

*** “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.” Lorimar. $39.95. NR.

Winner of the 1971 foreign film Academy Award, directed by Vittorio De Sica and miraculously subtitled rather than dubbed, this evocation of a way of life lost in the Fascist period in Italy is sensuous, graceful and tragic. Watching this cultivated Sephardic Jewish family, whose landholdings in Ferrara go back centuries, paralyzed to do anything substantive as Mussolini’s decrees restrict Jewish rights, one by one, is agony--but it is exactly the point of novelist Giorgio Bassani. Dominique Sanda and Helmut Berger are the golden youngsters in the family, and they may never have appeared so seductively spoiled.