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:

“SAMSON”(Poland, 1961; director Andrzej Wajda; 4 & 9 p.m.). Based on a novel by co-scenarist Kazimierz Brandys, this relatively little-seen Wajda film belongs with his other black-and-white World War II nightmares, the “Generation” trilogy and “Korczak.” It’s an allegorical thriller about a Jewish escapee from the Warsaw ghetto (Serge Moulin, who looks like a French Kafka) and his terror-filled wanderings through the “open” city. Like an unconscious hex, the fugitive tends to bring destruction or loss to all who aid him; finally, like the biblical Samson, he “tears down the walls.” The movie--gruelingly tense, lyric and hypnotic by turns--conveys, with hallucinatory force, that cruel intensity and sharpening of the nerves that accompanies an omnipresent fear of death.

Recommended:

“SWEET MOVIE”(France/Canada, 1974; Dusan Makavejev; 1:30 & 6:45 p.m.). The sexiest and most scandalous of Makavejev’s films--suffering critical abuse and scanty distribution in 1974--”Sweet Movie” jarringly mixes lovemaking and murder, sugar and blood, innocence and evil. The double-stranded story offers two visions of women: as outlandish victim and revolutionary murderer. In the first, naive heiress Carole Laure is kidnaped, violated, seduced on the Eiffel Tower and dumped with the garbage; in the other, candy barge siren Anna Prucnal--her boat has a head of Karl Marx on the prow and chocolates in the hold--seduces men and knifes them in a bed of sugar. It may seem the last word in ‘70s excess, but, like all Makavejev’s work, it’s sweet-tempered, bemused and ironic.

“THE MIRACLE”(Ireland, 1991; Neil Jordan; 4:15 & 9:15 p.m.). Jordan’s return to Ireland is also a return to form: a jazzily poetic tale of erotic obsession, with Hitchcock-Welles allusions buried in a tone of lyrical reminiscence. Here, two provincial teen-agers--in Jordan’s own seaside hometown of Bray--trail a mystery woman who carries Cornell Woolrich’s “Night Has a Thousand Eyes” in her bag and sometimes seems to have stepped from its pages. (None of the other voyeur-obsession thrillers have a twist quite like this one.) With Niall Byrne and Lorraine Pilkington as the pursuers, Beverly D’Angelo as their prey, and gorgeous Philippe Rousellot cinematography. Also Saturday.