TODAY AT THE AFI

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. Information: (213) 466-1767. Highly Recommended:

“KANAL”(Poland, 1957; director Andrzej Wajda; 1:40, 4:05 & 9:30 p.m.). As a teen-ager, Wajda was a World War II Resistance fighter; as a 30-year-old, he directed the bleakest, most brilliant and harrowing portrait of the Resistance in all of cinema. Made the same year as Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” it’s an even more powerful and stylish statement of revulsion against war: a nightmare in which Polish soldiers trapped during the fall of Warsaw try to make their way through the city’s sewers and, one by one, are killed or fall into Nazi hands. Even though we know from the film’s first shot that all of them are doomed, the tension is unremitting, the pathos searing. Virtuosic and hair-raising, this is both a classic war movie and a great film noir. (Michael Wilmington) “MAN IS NOT A BIRD”(Yugoslavia, 1965; Dusan Makavejev; 4:15 & 9:15 p.m.). Makavejev’s dazzling 1965 debut feature, shot in the off-the-cuff style of the French New Wave and set in a bleak industrial landscape, centers on a local beauty (Milena Dravic) and her love affairs. Makavejev shrewdly uses sex and humor to distract the authoritarian-minded from his considerable, pointed social criticism. Highly entertaining.

Recommended:

“TRAFFIC JAM”(Japan; Mitsuo Kurotsuchi; 4 & 9 p.m.). In this dark comedy-satire, Kurotsuchi overreaches shamelessly but strikes a nerve. A young Tokyo couple (Kenichi Hagiwara, Hitomi Kuroki) and their two small children warily decide to brave horrendous freeway traffic to visit the husband’s faraway parents. Disastrous incidents pile up. The trip emerges as a powerful metaphor for ordinary urban Japanese cut off from their ancestral roots.