Critics' Choice

MOVIES

OLIVER & COMPANY. Dickens with a twist: the sprightly tale of an orphan cat named Oliver, a gang of raffish dogs and a pampered poodle with Bette Midler's voice. A jaunty love song to New York City, and the best Disney cartoon feature since Walt died.

SCROOGED. The very meanest executive in the whole TV business (think of it!) finally gets the Christmas spirit. In this amiable, slapdash comedy, Bill Murray is a sleazy delight. God bless him, everyone.

THE ACCUSED. Can a slut be raped? That is the question in this engrossing drama about a victimized vamp (Jodie Foster) and an avenging angel of a prosecutor (Kelly McGillis) who pursues her case.

A CRY IN THE DARK. A mother's nightmare -- the loss of her baby -- is compounded when she is wrongly convicted of murdering the infant. Meryl Streep is awesomely austere as the second victim in this tough-minded drama, based on a 1980 case in Australia.

THEATER

SPOILS OF WAR. Kate Nelligan glows as a feckless but fascinating mother in Michael Weller's poignant story of estranged parents and a teen son who schemes to reunite them. Now on Broadway.

HEARTBREAK HOUSE. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the biggest U.S. regional theater, presents a rumbustious staging of Shaw's dark comedy of the onset of World War I.

BOOKS

PARTING THE WATERS: AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS, 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster; $24.95). The first half of a two-volume biography as social history puts Martin Luther King Jr. at the center of the American revolution in race relations that began with sit-ins and Freedom Rides and ended with President Lyndon B. Johnson maneuvering a stalled civil rights bill through Congress.

THE HIGH ROAD by Edna O'Brien (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $18.95). The Irish author made her reputation writing about headstrong girls dashing toward the flame of maturity; her tenth novel portrays women who have come out on the other side, badly burned.

THE MARCOS DYNASTY by Sterling Seagrave (Harper & Row; $22.50). This merciless account of the Philippine dictator's rise and fall poses many intriguing questions, answering some. Why did Ferdinand purloin billions of dollars? What did Imelda want with all those shoes?

MUSIC

WAS (NOT WAS): WHAT UP, DOG? (Chrysalis). Shades of Tom Waits, and Talking Heads, and the Pet Shop Boys too. Funny, crusty dance songs, polished to a very urbane sheen.

LOS LOBOS: LA PISTOLA Y EL CORAZON (Warner Bros.). Nine Mexican songs, contemporized but not homogenized by an ace rock band. Roots music for everyone to share.

/ LISZT: CONCERTOS NOS. 1 AND 2; TOTENTANZ (DG). Pianistic fireworks from Poland's Krystian Zimerman, abetted by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony. Tops: the underrated Totentanz (Dance of Death), a performance sure to rattle a few skeletons.

TELEVISION

LARRY KING'S NIGHT OF SOVIET TELEVISION (TBS, Nov. 30, 8:05 p.m. EST). The talk-show host presides over a three-hour sampler of video glasnost, ranging from documentaries and quiz shows to a bedroom farce adapted from Dostoyevsky.

THE WONDER YEARS (ABC, Wednesdays, 9 p.m. EST). A twelve-year-old grapples with Viet Nam, young love and junior-high bullies during the 1960s in this wistful and often winning series.

THE TENTH MAN (CBS, Dec. 4, 9 p.m. EST). Anthony Hopkins and Derek Jacobi lead a blue-chip British cast in Graham Greene's story about a French lawyer, imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II, who bargains to save his skin.

ART

COURBET RECONSIDERED, Brooklyn Museum, New York City. Vast landscapes, lavish nudes and masterful portraits in an ambitious retrospective of paintings by the 19th century realist. Through Jan. 16.

THE DRAWINGS OF RICHARD DIEBENKORN, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. A full-scale survey of the West Coast painter's works on paper, offering a rich view of his abstract and representational periods. Through Jan. 10.

THE PASTORAL LANDSCAPE, National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, Washington. In this joint venture, the National offers "The Legacy of Venice," two centuries of painting from Giorgione (a progenitor of the pastoral genre) to Watteau, while the Phillips, in "The Modern Vision," carries the theme from Constable down to Matisse. Through Jan. 22.