MOVIES. . . "BURNT BY THE SUN

" Serguei Kotov, the central figure of Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov's film, which won this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar, is an aging hero of the Bolshevik revolution now living quietly on a country dacha with his beautiful young wife and adoring child. Into an almost unbearably beautiful day suffused with golden sun comes Dimitri, former lover of Kotov's wife and now member of the secret police. What Kotov doesn't learn until it's too late is that Dimitri has come not to steal his wife, but to conduct him to prison, humiliation and death. The genius of director Mikhalkov's film, saysTIME film critic Richard Schickel, is its "refusal to foreshadow, for it makes the outcome more chilling. This is how evil often comes to us, masked in geniality, on a day when the sun is shining."