TODAY AT AFI FESTIVAL

F ollowing are The Times’ recommendations for today’s schedule of the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival, with commentary by the film reviewing staff. Information: (213) 466-1767. Highly Recommended:

“EL CID”(U.S.; Director’s Guild of America; 7 p.m.) If the chivalric ideal is at the heart of Corneille’s drama “Le Cid,” honor beyond death keys the historical legend itself, especially its grisly, necrophile climax: the corpse’s last charge at the Spanish-Moorish Battle of Valencia. Anthony Mann’s movie version, shot in Spain for Samuel Bronston in lavishly recreated castles, from a script by Philip Yordan, Fredric M. Frank and (uncredited) Ben Barzman, is the kind of super-spectacle they don’t make any more, maybe can’t make any more. This restored print, with 16 minutes added to the original 184, shows why. It’s a vast, teeming pageant, beautifully shot by Robert Krasker, loaded with decor and furious action. Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, at their physical peaks, play Rodrigo and Chimene, and though the film is not too successfully intimate--when the stars kiss, it’s like Zeus and Hera smooching--it does have overpowering scale, black-hearted villains, pure knights and ladyloves. It also has political savvy. Blacklist victim Barzman helps paint a corrupt, obsessive Spanish court as a dark backdrop for El Cid’s nobility.