Critics' Choice

MUSIC

INDIGO GIRLS: INDIGO GIRLS (Epic). Love's Recovery and Land of Canaan are the winners here, in an album full of saline nouveau folk songs sung by two gifted writer-performers. The Indigos have their roots in the up-front message music of the early '60s and the more abstruse lyrical digressions of the Georgia rock band REM; it's an intriguing combination and one that merits nurturing.

TIN MACHINE: TIN MACHINE (EMI). It's David Bowie, lying low with a new band that he helped create and whose rough edges he hones to a good cutting edge. Lots of fever-blister guitar work and apocalyptic Bowie lyrics. Crack City ought to be a sci-fi hallucination, but Bowie knows better: he makes it into an everyday nightmare.

ART

HELEN FRANKENTHALER: A PAINTINGS RETROSPECTIVE, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. In the 1950s, Frankenthaler's lyrical washes of color had a decisive influence on abstract expressionism; today she ranks as America's best-known living woman artist. These 40 canvases from four decades show why. Through Aug. 20.

ON THE ART OF FIXING A SHADOW: 150 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY, National Gallery, Washington. The history of photography as art, assembled from public and private collections around the world. Over 400 original pictures representing 200 photographers. Among them: Louis Daguerre, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Through July 30.

AGAINST NATURE: JAPANESE ART IN THE EIGHTIES, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Architect Arata Isozaki and fashion designer Issey Miyake are famous abroad, but contemporary visual art from Japan is still little known in the West. The first major U.S. museum show from Japan in more than 20 years brings American audiences up-to-date with a survey of new work from the cultural center of East Asia. Through Aug. 6.

BOOKS

POLAR STAR by Martin Cruz Smith (Random House; $19.95). In a sequel to his best-selling detective novel Gorky Park, Smith sets Moscow investigator Arkady Renko off on another bizarre case. The setting this time is a fishing boat on the Bering Sea; one dead body leads to others along an arc of increasing menace and violence.

FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar Straus Giroux; $22.95). Friedman won two Pulitzer Prizes during the 1980s while covering the Middle East for the New York Times. Now based in Washington, he looks back on the harsh realities of a region drenched in myths and bloodshed.

THEATER

ASPECTS OF LOVE. London's West End is illuminated by Andrew Lloyd Webber's lyrical meditation on romance. Five actors led by the able Michael Ball discover that love is a process of teaching and almost of parenting. Lloyd Webber's score, though repetitive, is gorgeous.

UBU. Played on a tiled set that suggests an immense urinal, this revised version of Alfred Jarry's absurdist classic Ubu Roi -- about a murderous nincompoop who seizes the crown of Poland -- remains as hilarious off-Broadway (and only a little less outrageous) than when outraged Parisian theatergoers rioted in 1896.

TELEVISION

THE MOON ABOVE, THE EARTH BELOW (CBS, July 13, 9 p.m. EDT). For the 20th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's one small step, Dan Rather and Charles Kuralt are on hand to wax nostalgic.

COPS (Fox, July 15, 8 p.m. EDT). Glasnost reached another milestone last spring, when the producers of this documentary-style series about real cops were allowed to follow a group of Soviet policemen. Two weeks of shooting resulted in this special one-hour episode.

P.O.V. (PBS, debuting July 18, 10 p.m. on most stations). This summer series -- a collection of independent documentaries, all expressing their makers' "point of view" -- launches its second season with Who Killed Vincent Chin?, an Oscar-nominated film about the 1982 slaying of a young Chinese- American engineer.

MOVIES

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY . . . it was loathe at first sight. But he (Billy Crystal) learned to accept her (Meg Ryan) as a friend, with almost no romantic strings attached. The "almost" makes for a witty sexual tension in Rob Reiner's comic valentine to love, friendship, Manhattan and Woody Allen.

GREAT BALLS OF FIRE. This bio-pic stamps demon rocker Jerry Lee Lewis as a feral innocent in a time warp, instead of cottoning to the sexual and class danger he held for Middle America. But Dennis Quaid inhabits Jerry Lee with a nicely calculating recklessness, and Winona Ryder is hypnotically enigmatic as the singer's nymphet bride.