Critics' Choice

BOOKS

THE DAY OF CREATION by J.G. Ballard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $17.95). The quest for a hidden river in the Sahara unleashes a mythic adventure. Splendid surrealism from the author of Empire of the Sun.

FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIME by Peter Gay (Norton: $25). The founder of psychoanalysis is revealed as an ambitious outsider driven by a heroic (and perhaps neurotic?) greed for knowledge and a desire to conquer and control.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Knopf: $18.95). A spurned suitor endures 50 years of solitude to win his woman, in the Nobel laureate's sprawling, exuberant fable.

CINEMA

WHITE MISCHIEF. The African sun sets British blueblood sizzling in a steamy adaptation of James Fox's chronicle of decadence and murder in the Kenyan colony.

BEETLEJUICE. Spook spouses defend their home against the creeps who just moved in. Director Tim Burton's ectoplasmic comedy sails on a raft of witty special effects and old Harry Belafonte songs.

BILOXI BLUES. Neil Simon's wartime cliches are smartly polished by Director Mike Nichols and sharply worn by Matthew Broderick (as a wise-guy G.I.) and Christopher Walken (his tough sarge).

MUSIC

THE DEL-LORDS: BASED ON A TRUE STORY (Enigma). Tough but graceful rock from a New York City-based band. No song has ever caught better than Cheyenne the hopeless romance of a city boy's vision of wide-open spaces.

RUBEN BLADES: NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH (Elektra). The Panamanian sensation's first all-English album is a stone dazzler. A bold, totally successful mix of Latin pop, jazz, rock, doo-wop and unflung street passion.

THE ROSSINI TENOR (Arabesque). Up bel canto hill and down rodomontade dale, con brio, with the rising young opera star Rockwell Blake.

THEATER

M. BUTTERFLY. Playwright David Henry Hwang reimagines the bizarre espionage case of a French diplomat and his Chinese transvestite lover as a bravura Broadway rap on East vs. West and male vs. female.

THE GOSPEL AT COLONUS. An unlikely mix of glorious gospel music and Sophoclean scenes yields a cheering new Broadway musical.

THE TALE OF LEAR. Japanese Avant-Garde Director Tadashi Suzuki and four U.S. regional theaters joinly create an incantatory short version of Shakespeare's tragedy, now at StageWest in Springfield, Mass.

TELEVISION

THIS HONORABLE COURT (PBS, May 2 and 9, 9 p.m. on most stations). A behind- the-scenes glimpse of the Supreme Court at work, in two parts.

THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL (CBS, May 8, 9 p.m. EDT). The officers of the Caine vs. a mentally unstable Captain Queeg (Brad Davis), in Robert Altman's new production of Herman Wouk's drama.

THE BOURNE IDENTITY (ABC, May 8 and 9, 9 p.m. EDT). Mr. Mini-Series, Richard Chamberlain, stars in a two-parter based on Robert Ludlum's novelabout an amnesiac desperately seeking his past.