TODAY AT AFI FESTIVAL

F ollowing 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. All screenings at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset. Information: (213) 466-1767. Highly Recommended:

“THE OAK”(Romania/France; Lucian Pintilie; 4:15 & 9:15 p.m.) Perhaps the major Romanian film in several decades, and certainly the most ambitious, longtime exile Pintilie’s post-Ceausescu saga is deliberately brutal, nasty, shocking and profane: a picaresque journey into chaos, a portrait of a nation on the brink. The central characters, a teacher and doctor in love, act like punk rebels, a criminal couple on the run. Fittingly, the film starts when the “heroine’s” father dies under a toppled projector and she sets fire to his room; gang rapes, persecutions, official murders and police gun-downs occur with such regularity, we become immured. The humor here is dark, caustic, sometimes out of control. A scream lies underneath. (Michael Wilmington)

Recommended:

“CHICKPEAS”(U.S.; Nigol Bezjian; 1:35, 4:05, 6:30 & 9:05 p.m.) Sincere in the best sense of the word, writer-director Bezjian’s warm and engrossing debut feature follows the lives of three young Armenian refugees from Beirut struggling to make new lives for themselves within the self-enclosed world of Los Angeles’ Armenian community. (Kevin Thomas)

“MONEY”(France; Philippe Galland; 1:50 & 7 p.m.) Breezy culture-clash romance between two Parisian teen-agers: a Tunisian-born Muslim, out to crash the bourgeoise, and an upper-class candy-maker’s daughter. Bright, buoyant, fast, but superficial, Galland’s romantic comedy, co-written by Catherine (“36 Fillette”) Breillat, looks as chewy and melts as fast as one of the chocolate chickens Sami Bouajica’s brash Kamel corners in his candy-selling war. (M. W.)

“A FOREIGN FIELD”(Britain; Charles Sturridge; 4 & 9 p.m.) It starts rather mistily--a fussy, eccentric little British comedy about a group of Dunkirk veterans and survivors driving through the French countryside for one last look--and then, gradually, it wins us over, gliding past ditziness to comic pathos, rising to unexpected heights of emotion. The cast is an unusually fine one: Alec Guinness and Leo McKern as two symbiotically tied vets, Geraldine Chaplin, Edward Herrmann and John Randolph as a quarrelsome American trio, Lauren Bacall as a riddle, Jeanne Moreau as an exuberant ex-hooker. The writing by Roy Clarke and the direction by Sturridge are unassertive, quiet, nice. (Sturridge will be present for the screening.) (M. W.)

Others: “Sababu” (Burkina Faso; Nissy Joanny Traore; 1:30 & 6:45 p.m.) Unscreened. Murder, bureaucracy and the eccentricities of interpretation in a small African village.