TODAY AT AFI FESTIVAL

Following 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:

“NOUVELLE VAGUE”(France-Switzerland; director Jean-Luc Godard; Nuart, 7 p.m.). Godard’s latest, a romance of high finance at a Swiss estate where an unlikely intruder (Alain Delon) acts as catalyst for a group of jet-set corporate movers. Working with collaborator Anne-Marie Mieville, Godard has fashioned his most beautiful film since “Pierrot le Fou”: precise, allusive, mournfully graceful. A brilliant work, which demands, and repays, close attention. (Michael Wilmington). (Kevin Thomas concurs: “Quintessential Godard, quintessential cinema.”) CRITICS CHOICE: A discussion before the film by Wilmington.

“AMERICAN DREAM”(United States; Barbara Kopple; Monica 4-Plex, 7 p.m.). This toweringly fine, tragic film, 1991’s Oscar-winning documentary, charts with empathy but fairness the 5-year course of a meatpacker’s strike in Austin, Minn. Kopple records what happens as workers’ weekly paychecks shrink from $637 to $312, while their union’s confrontational tactics and a hired consultant fail them. . . . Kopple gives the term depression a recognizable human face. (Sheila Benson)

“STEP ACROSS THE BORDER”(Switzerland-Germany; Nicolas Humbert, Werner Penzel; Nuart, 9 p.m.). A brilliant fusion of film and subject: A black-and-white look at Fred Frith, a British blues composer and performer who’ll play anything, including water tumblers and the pencils on your desk. . . . We follow Frith from Zurich to London, Leipzig, Tokyo and New York, as he meets and plays en route with like-minded avant-garde musicians and filmmakers Robert Frank and, briefly, Jonas Mekas. (S.B.). CRITIC’S CHOICE with Benson.

Recommended:

“I, THE WORST OF ALL”(Argentina; Maria Luisa Benberg; Music Hall, 7 p.m.). A feminist tragedy, whose central character, nun and 17th-Century writer Juana Ines de Cruz, is trapped in a convent world, steadily succumbing to a pathologically misogynist archbishop and, later, the ravages of the plague. As Juana and her patroness, Assumpta Serna and Dominique Sanda are beautiful, pithy, disturbing. (M.W.)

JAMAA FANAKA TRIBUTE: “PENITENTIARY” & “EMMA MAE”(United States; Jamaa Fanaka; AFI Warner, 6:45 and 8:45 p.m.). The heart of the Fanaka tribute is the raw and dynamic “Penitentiary” with Leon Isaac Kennedy as the boxer-convict gradually evolving into a mythical figure: the oppressed black man who overcomes injustice. “Emma Mae,” a noteworthy debut (1976), is about a young woman from Mississippi learning to survive in L.A. (K.T.).

“LAST IMAGES OF THE SHIPWRECK”(Argentina/Spain; Eliseo Subiela; Music Hall, 9 p.m.). As mystical and dreamy as Subiela’s previous feature, “Man Facing Southeast,” but also more robust, this fable-romance-comedy-drama collides a repressed writer (“Southeast’s” subtle star Hugo Soto) with a family of crooks, oddballs, beauties and outcasts. It’s a softly cracked, languorous film moving to its own curious rhythms and humors. (M.W.).

Others: “Resident Alien” (AFI Mark Goodson) is an “interesting but over-ute look at Quentin Crisp in Manhattan.” (M.W.). “Enid Is Sleeping” (Monicac 4-Plex) is full of “arch, joyless humor . . . (and) spiraling, witless complications.” (S.B.).