TODAY AT THE AFI FESTIVAL

Following are The Times’ recommendations for today’s schedule of the American Film Institute International Film Festival, with commentary by the film reviewing staff. All screenings at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. Information: (213) 466-1767. Highly Recommended:

“CINEMA PARADISO”(Italy, 1989; director Giuseppe Tornatore; 1:50 and 7 p.m.). Winner of the best foreign language film Oscar, this shining valentine to the movies--full of homages, excerpts and a swooningly romantic Ennio Morricone score--is set mostly in a small Sicilian coastal village in the ‘40s and ‘50s, where a great bear of a projectionist (Philippe Noiret, dubbed but marvelous) is paterfamilias to a movie-mad provincial youth. Tornatore’s film has dramatic flaws and it’s unabashedly sentimental, but it gets right at the way movies capture and enrapture us.

“LOVE AFFAIR, OR THE CASE OF THE MISSING SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR”(Yugoslavia, 1968; Dusan Makavejev; 4 and 9 p.m.). Makavejev’s beguiling and heartbreaking story of how amazingly wrong a sunny, and seemingly right, romance can go. Eva Ras is a bewitching switchboard operator, Slobodan Aligrudic a highly proficient rat catcher, and the wistful couple, despite approaching darkness, seem made for each other. (Kevin Thomas) “A brilliant demonstration of the radical cinema collage technique Makavejev, like Godard, employed in the late ‘60s. A highly polemical, artificial form . . . but, in Makavejev’s hands, life, violence and love burst through with electric force.”

Others: “James Ellroy” (Austria; Reinhard Jud; 1:30 and 6:45 p.m.). The author of “Black Dahlia” and “White Jazz,” looking like a slightly seedy John Q. Public, drives around L.A. and reminisces about the bad old days. Pseudo-tough to the max: More about Ellroy than the city, and not too illuminating--except around the edges--about either.