MOVIES - April 4, 1989

Foreign Film File: “The Commissar,” a Soviet film briefly banned in East Germany, has been voted best movie distributed in the last year by East German critics. The film, about a Red Army soldier who faces a dilemma when she has a baby and can no longer fight, questions heroic cliches that used to dominate Soviet films about the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought the communists to power. . . . The makers of a South African anti-war film titled “The Stick” have decided not to release it in their homeland because censors ordered 48 cuts. Censors also barred anyone under 21 from seeing the movie and ruled that it could only be shown in theaters with fewer than 200 seats. “The Stick” is based loosely on the undeclared border war fought by South African forces in recent years in northern Namibia and southern Angola.