THE BEST OF 1983

Berlin Alexanderplatz. The harsh twilight of an amiable brute (Gunter Lamprecht) presages the arrival of Nazism's long night. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's mesmerizing 15 1/2-hour film is a masterpiece of social and sexual misanthropy.

The Big Chill. Seven survivors of the '60s meet for a weekend to find a little warmth in the not so simple '80s. Aided by a resourceful cast, Writer-Director Lawrence Kasdan revives some old-fashioned movie virtues: grace, wit, subtlety, style.

Heart Like a Wheel. This B-movie biography of Shirley Muldowney, first woman to become a national hot-rod champion, boasts crisp, compassionate direction by Jonathan Kaplan and an Oscar-worthy performance from Bonnie Bedelia.

The Night of the Shooting Stars. In 1944, a score of Tuscan villagers flee from the Nazis into a landscape of nightmare poetry. Italian Film Makers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani find aspects of nobility in every eccentric peasant.

La Nuit de Varennes. Louis XVI's flight from the French Revolution is acutely observed by Director Ettore Scola, who concludes that history is an accident, ideology an irony, humanity's greatest blessing its distractibility.

Star 80. Coolly, precisely but with hypnotic power, Bob Fosse converts Playmate Dorothy Stratten's murder into a harrowing tragedy of manners and a tale about the killing power of sleazy dreams.

Tender Mercies. A country singer touches bottom and finds that it consists of good Texas earth in which he can reroot his humanity. Actor Robert Duvall warms and graces Screenwriter Horton Foote's tale with his lived-in face and a performance as raw as a Hank Williams ballad.

Terms of Endearment. Morals, mortality, even a mid-life crisis or two are all subjects for James L. Brooks' rich, sweet, sad comedy. Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger strike sparks and smiles as the middle-American mother and daughter.

Yentl. Gotta sing! Gotta dance! Gotta study that Talmud! Filling every function but set decorator on this lavish musical, Barbra Streisand transforms a tale of the shtetl into a moving metaphor for her own determination and talent.

Zelig. Technically bedazzling, Woody Allen's parody of a square-cut documentary is also a hard-edged examination of the way modern celebrity rituals, magnified by the media, bend people's minds and perhaps deaden their hearts.