Fit to Guide?

The film critics of The Times have picked the best films of the ‘80s (“Films of the ‘80s--Critics Recall the Best,” Dec. 24). Sheila Benson says that this “was one of the sorriest decades in the annals of film.” I too would yet consider this a sorry decade if I believed that the films cited by the Times’ critics were indeed the best. Look at the choices!

Peter Rainer, Kevin Thomas and Michael Wilmington chose 19 foreign films among their 30 choices. They include such films as “The Makioka Sisters,” “Himatsuri,” “The Legend of Surami Fortress” and “Heimat.”

It is not surprising that in the lists of Benson, Rainer, Thomas and Wilmington only one of the 10 top-grossing films of the decade (“E.T.”) receives any mention.

One no longer expects that film critics will share the preferences of the filmgoing public for whom reviews are written. But even such commercial and critical successes as “Rain Man,” “Amadeus,” “Chariots of Fire” and “Platoon” receive no mention at all on the Times’ critics lists.

Some unquestionably good films (“E.T.,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Raging Bull”) do make the lists, but the most-mentioned film of all is “Blue Velvet,” a film Benson calls “a stylized vision of the rot below.”

How can readers of The Times who are looking for guidance on what films to see rely on the judgment of a group of critics whose taste in films range from the totally obscure (“Heimat”) to the utterly strange (“Blue Velvet”)?

CRAIG LANCASTER

Los Angeles