Today at the AFI Festival

Following are capsule reviews of today’s screenings in the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival at the Cineplex Odeon Century Plaza Cinemas: ‘The Spectre of War’

Nicaragua, 1988, 87 minutes 9:15 p.m. Not a great or even very good film perhaps, but an intensely interesting one for both subject matter and origin: a Nicaraguan look at the current war with the Contras. Ramiro Lacayo Deshon’s story suggests Frank Borzage’s anti-war movies: a student from the provinces hits it big in Managua in dance and romance, but the draft ends his idyll. Forced into the embattled countryside, he finds his life irrevocably changed. The film is slanted, but not at all jingoistic; it suggests, instead, a gentle, lyric impulse crying for relief from war’s savagery.