By Andrew Sarris

August 19, 2001 | 8:00 p.m

In all the years I've been reviewing movies-and my first

published review goes back to 1955-I've been attacked more often for my raves than for my pans. People feel culturally superior to you when they dislike something you like. Meanwhile, when the shoe is on the other foot, they become culturally insecure. Still, I've learned never to argue with people over movies. Well, hardly ever. As it happens, we all see different movies on the same screen. Movie-watching is a form of psychoanalysis in dreamland, and we all have different case histories. I've been led into these ruminations by a very annoying article with the presumptuous title "How to Tell a Bad Movie From a Truly Bad Movie," by Franz Lidz and Steve Rushin, in the Aug. 5 New York Times . The authors ostensibly prefer movies that set out to be bad, like Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space , They Saved Hitler's Brain and "the all-midget musical western The Terror of Tiny Town ," over "smug" and "pretentious" movies that are truly bad, but manage to fool us critics into taking them seriously. These include Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and A.I. , and Oscar-winners such as Out of Africa , The English Patient and Dances With Wolves . Springtime for Hitler , anyone? To support their updated camp gospel, Mr. Lidz and Mr. Rushin quote all sorts of peculiar authorities like "one high-placed Warner Brothers executive, who wishes for obvious reasons to remain anonymous"; Lloyd Kaufman, impresario of the malodorous Troma Entertainment; and John Waters, whose work is just a few levels above Mr. Kaufman's cinema of intentional stinkeroos. Mr. Lidz and Mr. Rushin are astute enough to avoid making themselves the targets of naysayers by giving any inkling of what they think is good, except for one possible slip: "No 'Worst Film' list is definitive. One man's Patch Adams is another man's Pather Panchali ." This seems to imply that Pather Panchali is a standard of excellence, and not what the late François Truffaut considered a big bore. Mr. Lidz and Mr. Rushin are also very careful not to trifle with a pretentious minority director like Spike Lee. For that matter, is Ingmar Bergman as boring and pretentious as many people think? (Woody Allen to the contrary notwithstanding.) Yet the biggest omission for me in the Lidz-Rushin inverted canon is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux , which I recently suffered through with a mostly male geriatric audience. I had seen the original cut of the film at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, and most of the American critics in attendance back then swarmed all over Mr. Coppola with questions about the film's ruinous cost, implying that it had been a catastrophic ego trip for him. The French critics were of a different mind about Apocalypse Now , and it shared the Grand Prix with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum , which was better received in America than Apocalypse Now in 1979. Why the big critical switch now? I suspect that Apocalypse Now Redux is being used as a club against Pearl Harbor , and I agree that Robert Duvall's helicopter-gunship squadron attack on a Viet Cong village is perhaps the most exciting battle scene in the history of the cinema, and makes Pearl Harbor look like a children's toy. But that's it, and it comes early. The rest of the film is zero, nada -tedious, uninvolving and terminally overwritten by Mr. Coppola, John Milius and Michael Herr. What little sex has been added to the film in the Redux cut is as lethargic as the rest of the journey up the river toward the 45-minute anticlimax with an out-of-control Marlon Brando, as out-of-sync with his director as Colonel Kurtz is insanely impervious to the military chain of command. But what struck me most strongly this time is that Apocalypse Now is not a war film at all, except for the helicopter raid. There is no sense of the enemy except as a literary abstraction. Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), shot in England, comes much closer to dramatizing the conflict between two adversaries than does Apocalypse Now Redux , which ends up as a clumsy, incoherent adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness . I might have forgiven Mr. Lidz and Mr. Rushin for their slyly derisive attitude toward the medium of movies itself if they hadn't persisted in their silly denigration of Mr. Spielberg's A.I. , a film I greatly admire. I've been aware of a backlash against the film for some time, but I wasn't surprised. Far from being the sentimental lollipop many of its detractors claim, A.I. is a disturbingly subversive experience for audiences. Aside from projecting the end of the world and the end of humanity, the film contains three of the most unsettling existential images in all of cinema. The first shows David the mechanical boy at the bottom of a swimming pool, immune from drowning and thus immortal in a sense, but also desperately lonely and abandoned. The second shows him in the workshop of his inventor "father," looking at a row of replicas made in his image and thus prepared to deprive him of his uniqueness. The third comes at the end, when he can sleep and dream after 2,000 years as a result of his "mother" finally saying that she loves him-which demonstrates that we become human not merely from loving, but from being loved. One day of happiness in 2,000 years: I don't think many kids today would consider this a good deal. In fact, there's no identification for anyone in the remarkable Oedipal transfiguration of this romantic character. Getting back to my function as a critic, I see no point in encouraging any degree of badness in movies, particularly the kind of badness that knows no shame. Instead, I shall keep looking for good movies to recommend. High on my list at the moment is Paul Cox's Innocence , the most powerfully emotional love story of the year so far, which is quite remarkable inasmuch as Julia Blake's Claire and Charles Tingwell's Andreas are both of a certain age generally more suited on the screen for meditative memory than for a resurgence of sexual passion. Mr. Cox eloquently explains his unequivocal choice of subject: " Innocence sums up all the things I have touched upon in my other films: modern and traditional love-very carefully explored. But in Innocence they are very concisely put together. It is about love in old age-and specifically having the opportunity to explore your first love again. You never love like that again in your life. That is why the film is called Innocence ." Mr. Cox took three years to write the script, but the financing took several years to complete, which is characteristic for filmmakers out of the mainstream. But who is Paul Cox, and where is he coming from really? David Thomson is especially perceptive on this point in his Biographical Dictionary of Film : "So many directors have left Australia, it is important to stress that Cox only reached that land in his early twenties, bringing with him the anguished visionary sensibility of one of his countrymen-Van Gogh. (Cox is the only Dutchman to have taken the painter as a subject, in a heartfelt but deliberate documentary in which John Hurt was the voice of Van Gogh.)" Now in his early 60's, Mr. Cox has made more than 25 feature films and documentaries since his first full-length feature, Illuminations , in 1976. As with Innocence , most of his films hover in that shadowy divide between love and death. Hence, it is not surprising that Mr. Cox has expressed his spiritual and stylistic debt to the Russian exile director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), particularly for The Sacrifice (1986). Fortunately, Mr. Cox is not lacking in a certain rueful humor completely absent in the Tarkovsky oeuvre . This is to say that the wintry romance and reunion of Andreas Borg (Charles Tingwell), retired organist and music teacher, with Claire (Julia Blake), his first true love, 50 years after they shared a passionate affair in postwar Belgium, does not amuse Claire's husband, John (Terry Norris), as much as his stunned reaction amuses us. The exquisite quality of Mr. Cox's sensibility is revealed in his showing as much compassion for John as for the two late-life lovers. The probabilities of mortality provide the suspense and surprise of this story told on the edge of eternity. Young Claire (Kristien Van Pellicom) and young Andreas (Kenny Aernouts) are shown in Antwerp, Belgium, about 50 years before, but purely as memory images of who they once were. We never learn, for example, why they broke up in the first place; we see only that they were once young and attractive enough to leave behind lasting memories. The film was shot over five weeks in Antwerp and Adelaide, Australia. Adelaide was chosen as the main locale because of partial funding by the South Australian Film Corporation, and the decision to shoot the flashback sequences of the young lovers in Antwerp was made because of a one-million-Belgian-franc Grand Prix award won by Mr. Cox's A Woman's Tale at the Flanders International Film Festival in Ghent in 1992. The Claire of Ms. Blake, the Andreas of Mr. Tingwell and the John of Mr. Norris are brilliant performances that envelop their parts, and yet they gain in the illusion of realism because of the unfamiliarity of the players in America after long seasoning Down Under. The climax of the film is accompanied by a thrilling musical score that lifts the characters to a sublime metaphysical level such as is seldom attained in the cinema. Innocence is a film for the ages. If, as Tolstoy once observed, narrative art is the transmission of emotion through artistic forms, the cinema seems singularly well-equipped for the task. To ridicule the emotions in films like Innocence in the name of a higher sophistication-indeed, to ridicule any communication of emotion in any movie-one runs the risk of becoming absurdly irrelevant to the peculiar genius of the medium. Banality is one thing, aridity quite another. If I have overstated my case, so be it.