Where's Poppa?. Carl Reiner's manic and excruciatingly funny film about what a son is to do when his aged mother just won't leave him alone. The whole movie operates at a hyped-up level that does not so much ignore reality as compress it. Reiner has also succeeded in finding a visual equation for his primarily verbal humor on occasion. George Segal is the son, Ruth Gordon is Mom, and there are awfully nice bits by character actor Ron Leibman and an ingenue named Trish Van Devere.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. A film from Billy Wilder that is less severe than one might expect and less funny than one might hope. But there are many fine moments, a nice performance by Genevieve Page, and a kind of bad-boy-goes-straight kindness in Wilder's surprisingly gentle denouement.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Russ Meyer works in the genre that might best be called sensationalized violence, but who else can tell a bad story so well? The picture moves like a roaring train and features several heads being blown off.

M*A*S*H. A service comedy set during the Korean War and manned by a group of farceurs including Donald Sutherland, Sally Kellerman and Elliot Gould before he became obnoxious. Ring Lardner Jr. wrote the screenplay and Robert Altman directed, frenetically.

Two Mules for Sister Sara. A Don Siegel piece (with a screenplay by Albert Maltz from a story by Budd Boetticher) about a would-be nun (Shirley MacLaine) and a would-be pragmatist (Clint Eastwood) in a warring Mexico.

I also liked Karen Black's performance and a scene where Jack Nicholson sits down to play the piano in Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, a slick film about alienation which seemed to cut away to a Laszlo Kovacs Easy Rider scenic vista whenever something seemed about to happen; Alan Arkin's Yossarian in Mike Nichols' Catch-22; Carrie Snodgress's heroine and Frank Perry's paranoiac camera work in the somewhat overdrawn Diary of a Mad Housewife; Charles Bronson's headstrong investigator in Rene Clement's Rider on the Rain; the dripping decadence and provocative idea behind Performance; and the grand style of Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon and Michel Bouquet in the overly maligned Jacques Deray cartoon known as Borsalino.

Of course, making lists is an exercise that has little to do with reality and a lot to do with the more anal compulsions of the list-maker. If you think I have my head up my ass, by all means let me know.