Critics' Choice

CINEMA

TRACK 29. It's mother love with the proper stranger in this surreal treat from director Nicolas Roeg. Theresa Russell is the troubled mom, Gary Oldman the man who may be her son.

DEAD RINGERS. David Cronenberg (The Fly) directed this spooky, real-life parable of split identity: twin gynecologists drive themselves to dementia and a symbiotic suicide-murder. Jeremy Irons is exemplary as both twins.

RUNNING ON EMPTY. The gifted son (River Phoenix) of two '60s radicals must choose between his family and himself, without betraying either. Sidney Lumet's film bathes in political cliches and then comes clean.

MUSIC

RAY CHARLES: JUST BETWEEN US (CBS). Sublime. Listen to Charles sing Stranger in My Own Hometown: there doesn't seem to be a lonely corner his voice can't reach.

* RANDY NEWMAN: LAND OF DREAMS (Warner Bros.). A half-decade after his last major album, Newman delivers one of his best yet: twelve piercingly ironic songs, with a decided undertone of autobiography.

THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT (CBS). Oliver Sacks' neurological case study of a failing mind and a stalwart heart comes to vibrant operatic life in Michael Nyman's deft minimalist setting.

NIXON IN CHINA (Nonesuch). A waltz across the Great Wall with Dick, Pat, Henry, Mao and the missus: last year's best new opera is this year's best new opera recording.

BOOKS

THE LETTERS OF T.S. ELIOT 1898-1922 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $29.95). At last! The poet's centenary marks the publication of the first volume of his previously sealed correspondence.

THE MAGIC LANTERN by Ingmar Bergman (Viking; $19.95). Like a box full of old slides -- or a Bergman movie -- the director's searching memoirs are alive with frozen moments, many of them cruelly revealing.

THE FACTS: A NOVELIST'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Philip Roth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $17.95). Roth fans can finally discover how much of his writing is taken directly from his life (answer: quite a bit) and glimpse the peculiar process of transforming fact into fiction.

THEATER

NOTHING SACRED. Tom Hulce (Amadeus) plays a seductively nihilistic Russian revolutionary in an adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons that echoes the American '60s at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum.

HAMLET. Zeljko Ivanek, one of the nation's ablest young performers, scales the Everest of acting in a richly Freudian production at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater.

TELEVISION

LIBERACE (ABC, Oct. 2, 9 p.m. EDT; CBS, Oct. 9, 9 p.m. EDT). Dueling TV-movie bios about the glittering, grinning pianist who died last year of AIDS. ABC's docudrama, which has the benediction of Liberace's estate, stars Andrew Robinson. CBS's version, endorsed by Lee's disgruntled manager Seymour Heller, features Victor Garber.

TURNER NETWORK TELEVISION (Oct. 3, 8 p.m. EDT). Ted Turner's new TNT cable channel blasts off with a two-night presentation of Gone With the Wind.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE (PBS, Oct. 4, 9 p.m. on most stations). A 16-week series of documentaries focusing on figures and events in the nation's past debuts with a look at the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Upcoming subjects | include the Apache Indians and evangelist Father Coughlin.