Friedkin’s ‘Guardian’ Opens AFI Fest Tonight : Festival: The ambitious global program will last two weeks and offer more than 200 titles.

The 1990 American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival has its gala opening tonight with the world premiere of William Friedkin’s “The Guardian”--a supernatural shocker that returns the director of “The Exorcist” to his old stomping and slashing ground, the horror-thriller genre. On May 3, the festival closes with the premiere of the restored version of Stanley Donen’s “Funny Face.”

The two American films, both showing at the Cineplex Century Plaza in Century City, the festival’s main venue, book-end a fat, two-week-long, 200-plus titles program that probably represents the peak of the AFI festival’s four-year existence. This ambitious global program includes films from Western Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and Latin America; a “Hollywood Glasnost” special section on Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries that unearths many long-banned gems; and a strong program of independent black American films.

Also setting off the 1990 AFI Fest are the retrospectives planned for two great rarely-seen European filmmakers--Greek director Theo Angelopoulos and Poland’s Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The Times’ film reviewing staff--Sheila Benson, Kevin Thomas, Peter Rainer, Chris Willman and myself--covered most of the first week in last Sunday’s Calendar. Here’s an update, with special recommendations on movies screened since then.

Highly recommended: “Sitting Pretty on a Branch” (Czechoslovakia), “Recollections of the Yellow House” (Portugal), “A Tribute to Charles and Ray Eames” (U.S.), “Love Among the Ruins” (U.S.).

Recommended: “Samsara” (China), “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom” (U.S.).

In “Recollections of the Yellow House” (April 21), writer-director-star Joao Cesar Montiero, a skeletal looking bird, a sorrowful bookworm-buzzard, takes self-mockery and self-abasement far past Woody Allen. This film, which follows Montiero’s quasi-autobiographical mishaps as a down-and-out intellectual in a bedbug-ridden Lisbon boarding house--resembles Woody mixed with Dostoevski, Knut Hamsun and Louis-Ferdinand Celine: three literary monarchs of the lower depths whom Montiero occasionally quotes and often evokes. It’s a painful comedy that goes unusually dark and deep; it was a Silver Lion winner at the last Venice Film Festival.

Of the tribute to Charles and Ray Eames (April 21, 22), Sheila Benson reminds us that “the multi-talented Eameses represent a slice of time and place to Southern Californians” and feels that “this selection of the Eameses’ own work, plus a marvelous, lively film on them by grandson Eames Demetrios, does them complete justice.”

According to Benson, “Sitting Pretty on a Branch” (April 26), a comic fairy tale on the aftermath of World War II by Czechoslovakia’s Juraj Jaku Bisko, is a “magical film” and “a return to the great ‘60s period of Czechoslovakian cinema.”

Kevin Thomas considers writer James Costigan’s “Love Among the Ruins” (April 24, AFI Mark Goodson), a 1976 made-for-TV courtroom comedy with Katharine Hepburn as a haughty breach-of-promise defendant and Laurence Olivier as her love-struck barrister, “director George Cukor’s last great work . . . tinged with as much pathos as hilarity.” Thomas also recommends Sam O’Steen’s “Stardust Ballroom” (April 25), a “poignant 1975 made-for-TV love story,” with Maureen Stapleton and Charles Durning.

Director Huang Jianxin’s “Samsara” (April 22) is a Chinese film, made before the bloody May-June demonstrations, about a weak young man from the provinces drifting through the Peking underworld and slowly tarnishing his life and love. On one level, it’s a familiar cautionary fable of big-city evil; its prime interest comes from its iconoclastic, offbeat views of a Mainland China now more closed to us.

Ted Lange’s low-budget “Othello” (April 26), with the one-time “ooo-eee” king of “The Love Boat” directing, adapting and playing the title role--is a threadbare, labored, slightly over-sexy production, notable for its innovative black Iago (Hawthorne James). Thomas found Jean-Jacques Andrien’s “Australia” (April 26)--which, naturally enough, comes from Belgium--”a decidedly pretentious title for a tedious, long-winded film” about homecomings and steamy affairs. Chris Willman thinks Margareta Kasimova’s U.S.S.R. film, “Today and Always” (April 21), about a young actress bucking the provincial Muslim patriarchy, is “an interesting curiosity, with no consistency of tone.”

A long-time Duke Ellington fan, I liked “Sophisticated Lady” (April 21, AFI Mark Goodson), a documentary about Adelaide Hall, a Cotton Club chorus girl who popularized “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby” in the ‘20s and did the growling, wordless lead vocal in Ellington’s “Creole Love Call.”

Willman found “Painting the Town: The Illusionistic Murals of Richard Haas” (April 22, 24) a “feel-good documentary” about city muralist Haas, which may suffer from “unrelenting positivism” but “stands up as a pretty good, breezy look at a rare sort of upbeat American phenomenon.”

Festival information: (213) 480-2323 or 856-7707.