Critics' Voices

By TIME''s Reviewers. Compiled by Andrea Sachs

MOVIES

WILD AT HEART. You may have thought David Lynch set the standard for weirdness with his TV series, but compared with his horrifically, hilariously violent new road movie, Twin Peaks is the Bobbsey Twins. Be awed -- and grateful -- that nobody else makes movies like this.

GHOST. The summer's surprise smash has something for everyone: mystery, comedy and love with the proper corpse. This pile-driving romance trivializes the issue of mourning the dead (they don't usually return to earth for a quickie), but no matter. Audiences believe in Ghost. It's Field of Dreams with a little sex.

PRESUMED INNOCENT. Skip the film. Reread the book.

FILM FIND

METROPOLITAN. In this fizzy, poignant social comedy, a group of preppies lounge in a Park Avenue salon. They discuss Jane Austen novels, speak in Henry James sentences and try to live in Philip Barry's plays. Their manners are ) impeccable (a deb can be paid no higher compliment than being called "well read"), their snobbery impregnable (one boy doesn't have a driver's license because, he tuts, "I'm no jock!"). They know they are out of fashion and cheerfully debate their irrelevance, like dinosaurs analyzing their own bones. Most of them are moneyed, but they soon must admit to a crucial class distinction: between the aristocracy of the desired and the proletariat of the unloved. In short, they are very like the rest of us. Though his setting and dialogue are tres swank, writer-director Whit Stillman made Metropolitan for peanut shells, and with a cast of novice screen actors. Best of all, he compliments his viewers by respecting their intelligence. Moviegoers should don their tuxes and rush out to return the favor.

THEATER

RICHARD III. Shakespeare's equivalent of Saddam Hussein, the power-mad usurper who will do anything, is suddenly everywhere: Ian McKellen acts him in London, Stacy Keach in an upcoming Washington staging and Oscar-winner Denzel Washington (Glory) in New York City's Central Park. Are producers more farsighted than the CIA?

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Many a summer theater tries Shakespeare's comic delight, but perhaps only the Open Door Theater, a troupe that moves from town to town trying to reacquaint the heartland with the live stage, has set it in a coal mine -- Pioneer Tunnel in Ashland, Pa., this week only.

THE FANTASTICKS. Three decades after it opened off-Broadway (for 12,000-plus performances and still counting), the boy-meets-girl charmer starts a national tour at Wolf Trap, just outside Washington, in a spruced-up version starring Robert Goulet.

MUSIC

LISZT: TRANSCENDENTAL STUDIES, 1838 VERSION (MCA). Liszt simplified these pieces into the still ferociously difficult Transcendental Etudes (1852) for fear that no one else could play them. There may now be several fire-eating piano virtuosos who can execute the original notes, but few can liberate the prophetic music they contain as masterfully as Janice Weber does here.

BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET: MUSIC FROM MO' BETTER BLUES (Columbia). The best thing to come out of Spike Lee's disastrous movie about a fictional jazzman may be the sound-track recording by these four very real musicians and guest trumpeter Terence Blanchard. Driving hard-bop dominates, but the most memorable cut is a spare urban ballad, Again Never, written by the filmmaker's father, bassist Bill Lee.

TELEVISION

PROJECT EDUCATION (CBS, Sept. 2-7). CBS News marshals its forces for a week- long series of reports on America's woeful record in education. Along with segments on 60 Minutes, the CBS Evening News and other shows, a prime-time special anchored by Charles Kuralt (Sept. 6) will examine the problems and propose solutions.

FOX SUNDAY (Fox, Sept. 2). With The Simpsons transplanted to Thursdays, the Fox network's most successful night gets a near total overhaul. True Colors, one of two comedies debuting this week, is a sort of interracial Brady Bunch that treads familiar Norman Lear ground, witlessly. Parker Lewis Can't Lose, a sprightly Ferris Bueller knock-off about a high school wise guy, is fresher and funnier.

BOOKS

THE ANTS by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson (Harvard; $65). The result of 20 years of collaborative research into the mysteries of the planet's most ubiquitous and useful invertebrate superbly published for specialists and laymen.

SEVENTH HEAVEN by Alice Hoffman (Putnam; $19.95). In her eighth and by far best book, the novelist cuts through the old cliches about the suburban wasteland with characters who make even the Tupperware feel real.

OFF THE ROAD by Carolyn Cassady (Morrow; $22.95). The widow of Neal Cassady, model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation saga, On the Road, shows us what happened to these literary legends when forced to live in the slow lane.

ART

FROM POUSSIN TO MATISSE: THE RUSSIAN TASTE FOR FRENCH PAINTING, Art Institute of Chicago. The Hermitage and the Pushkin museums disgorge their treasures from such giants as Lorrain, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne and Gauguin. Sept. 8 to Nov. 25.

FAKES AND FORGERIES, Cincinnati Art Museum. From their own collections the curators come up with various sleights of hand as well as copies and pastiches made openly. Through Sept. 30.

ETCETERA

NEW YORK CITY OPERA. Leos Janacek's doomstruck From the House of the Dead is a distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel of life in a Siberian prison camp. A popular item in European opera repertory, it is receiving its tardy American stage premiere. Performances begin Aug. 28.

AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER. The National Endowment for the Arts may be the making of performance artist Karen Finley. Since it canceled her grant as part of its anti-obscenity campaign, her shows have been sellouts. This autumn festival in Cambridge, Mass., will feature her angry We Keep Our Victims Ready. Performances begin Sept. 4.