New movies. Usually by this time of year, when the Oscar nominations come out, and the Groundhog and the Valentines come out, and the senior theses come out, good new movies do nothing of the kind. It's the post-Christmas blight. This year as much as any Hollywood saved up for December, gambling that in this foul foul year when people across the world are facing disaster like never before, American moviegoers would be bored enough to relish apocalyptic scenes of their own destruction. Anyway, Christmas was a boom. Last year at this time, around when Patty Hearst and the SLA was everybody's talk, papillon and The Sting cranked on at most picture shows and there were no new feature films to speak of except perhaps for The Last Detail, which was nothing too special. But in 1975 It's February today, and two incredibly fine new movies are playing in Boston. Perhaps both A Woman Under the influence and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore opened with such bad business acumen because both are somewhat un-Hollywood in origin. John Cassavetes's Woman was made on a relative shoestring and without big studio backing--it might not make it to Youngstown. Ohio or Kallapol, either--although It's at the Cheri here. If you missed Chuck Stephen's review of it in yesterday's Crimson, or Andy Kopkind's fine piece about it in The Real Paper last week (with a great title--"Mabie's Mad Againe"), you ought to know that It's about a working class woman gone insane in the L.A. suburbs. Cassavetes, who made Husbands Faces, and Shadows, concentrates not on the origins of her madness but on the character of it and how that resonates among the people around her--her husbands, everybody tells her different things that they don't mean and finally they send her away. The director's snip-of-the-ribbon style, where nothing ends, begins, or needs flourishing, gives a quiet sense of real life to things, works in a vacuum land with no echoes. So along with Peter Falk's husband you almost want to shut this woman away--stop this noise now--even though the habit or the love or the movie of living with her makes it hard and guilty.

This picture is less watchable than Martin Scorsese's Alice, though they both take as many risks. Scorsese's Mean Streets was low-budget, high improvisational, and one of the few genuinely exciting movies of 1973. It's at the Kenmore Moviehouse early next week. Mean Streets was a critical smash in New York, but it never made much money, so maybe that's why this new Susskind-Warner production is a little too easy sometimes: when Ellen Burstyn takes off west from the nightmare of a suburb in New Mexico, we see the station wagon eat the highway with high-energy music playing behind, as though you're supposed to groove to the film instead of watching it. But the rest of Alice's journey from domination and fear to non-sexist union is much better. Scorsese has a great sense of how people miss each other's intentions, of how conflicts--and even the most brutal emotional cruelty--is often no one's fault. It takes the most indefatigable kind of strength--like what grows into Alice--to do something about this. All filmed in the instant consumer glare of Tucson, Phoenix, Johnny Carson and potato chips. At the Beacon Hill, with a pretty but stony Kris Kristofferson--if he hadn't written "Me and Bobby McGee." I'd never forgive him, because he damn near ruins this movie.

The Magnificent Ambesons. The other side of Citizen Kane, this is Orson follow-up to it, and his second-greatest film. Done with the same crew, and the Mercury Theater. It doesn't get around very much, and really worth seeing. Also at the Welles the beginning of next week is The Mask of Dimitrios, reputedly a great thriller with Peter Lorre, from the story by Eric Ambler.

Minnie and Moskowitz. An early and more flashy Cassavetes.