MOVIES - July 6, 1987

In Moscow, the glasnost beat goes on. The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda last week criticized Goskino, the state cinema body, for holding up the release of “Chernobyl: Autumn 1986,” a documentary on the nuclear disaster. Pravda said Goskino, which this year had its powers as a censoring body restricted, refused to screen the film “for flimsy reasons”: that it was too traditional, overoptimistic and derivative. “What a strange motive--’excessive optimism,’ ” the paper’s editorial read. “Are films with powerful criticisms the only ones worthy of attention? It is as if this is the only function of art.”