Critics' Voices

By TIME''s Reviewers. Compiled by Andrea Sachs

ART

KAZIMIR MALEVICH: 1878-1935. This sweeping retrospective shows off all phases of Malevich's avant-garde artistic career, from his abstract suprematist masterpieces to styles as diverse as neoprimitivism and cubo-futurism. At the National Gallery of Art, Washington, through Nov. 4.

RENOIR: THE GREAT BATHERS. Renoir's Great Bathers combined impressionist technique and the classical figure to produce a manifesto on how modern painting could also be monumental. The famous canvas is here surrounded with related paintings, drawings and sculptures. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Nov. 25.

MUSIC

WAS (NOT WAS): ARE YOU OKAY? (Chrysalis). In the two years since his group's groundbreaking album What Up, Dog?, Don Was has become a hotshot producer. But he still knows how to find a groove. The latest offering borrows its funk from James Brown, its harmonies from the Temptations, a heaping of wit from Zappa, and makes it all cook.

MARCUS ROBERTS: DEEP IN THE SHED (Novus). Now on his own after five years with the Wynton Marsalis band, this blind, bluesy, brilliant pianist is out with a gem of an album that showcases his skills as a composer as well as his stylish work at the keyboard.

CHANT GREGORIEN (Harmonia Mundi). This collection of medieval liturgical songs, featuring the late countertenor Alfred Deller and the Deller Consort, illustrates the paradox of austere expression that is also voluptuous.

TELEVISION

THE CIVIL WAR (PBS, Sept. 23-27). For five consecutive nights, Ken Burns' 12- hour documentary series will chronicle the nation's bloodiest conflict, using interviews, archival footage and readings by such people as Morgan Freeman and Jason Robards from documents of the era.

LEONA HELMSLEY: THE QUEEN OF MEAN (CBS, Sept. 23, 9 p.m. EDT). Another season of ripped-from-the-headlines docudramas gets under way as Suzanne Pleshette plays the hotel harridan. Can you resist?

ORPHEUS DESCENDING (TNT, premiering Sept. 24). Vanessa Redgrave dazzled London in a 1988 revival of Tennessee Williams' 1957 flop. Playing an Italian- American misfit in a small Southern town, she was less rapturously received in the subsequent Broadway production (the basis for this film). Still, her over-the-top performance fascinates.

THEATER

SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN. Good ole country folk sing the evening away in this funny, affectionate off-Broadway look at a Saturday night Bible Belt church meeting circa 1938. "Praise be!"

MY CHILDREN, MY AFRICA. South Africa's laureate of liberal anguish, Athol Fugard, staged the production at La Jolla Playhouse, near San Diego, of his harrowing play about the breakdown of civility and the possibility for compromise in his native land. As always with Fugard, the language is poetic, the vision inspiring and the truth unflinchingly confronted.

BOOKS

WHAT HAPPENED WAS THIS by Josh Greenfeld (Carroll & Graf; $18.95). This zesty comic novel about a young man's climb from Catskills waiter to Hollywood film director who testifies against his left-wing friends during the McCarthy era could have been called What Makes Sammy Rat?

NOW YOU KNOW by Kitty Dukakis with Jane Scovell (Simon & Schuster; $19.95). What starts out as another sad story of anxiety and alcohol abuse by the wife of a public official eventually turns into a moving saga of courage as the author struggles to come back from a defeat far more humiliating than her husband's wipeout at the polls.

MOVIES

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE. Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine embody the glamorous wit of Carrie Fisher's novel about an actress in rehab and her movie-star mom. Under the sorcerer's wand of director Mike Nichols, this terrific comedy is a Terms of Endearment in which nobody dies but everyone hurts.

THE TALL GUY. Jeff Goldblum is a lanky second banana to an overbearing comedian (Rowan Atkinson); Emma Thompson is the woman who slips on the peel of the tall guy's goofy allure. Keep your expectations low, and enjoy this deft British trifle.

SPOILS OF WAR

War is hell, but the postwar limbo may be worse. Grieving is a job for the strong. So says French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier in his exemplary Life and Nothing But. This epic romantic drama, set in the aftermath of World War I, reins in its anger but not its wistful passion. Gruff Philippe Noiret plays a French officer assigned to choose the corpse that will serve as the nation's Unknown Soldier. As he assists two women -- an attractive aristocrat (Sabine Azema) and a young teacher (Pascale Vignal) -- in locating their men, he realizes that there are many casualties on the scarred battlefields. They ) include those searching and mourning for their loved ones. At the end, Noiret sends a poignant love letter to Azema; the experience has made them a couple, perfectly matched but sadly unfulfilled. Tavernier, an ebullient bear of a man, is very much in the spirit of France's patron-saint director, Jean Renoir. In this monumental meditation on love in a time of war, Tavernier has made his own Rules of the Game.

ET CETERA

YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL. It's a bit like going to the U.S. Open for the girls' singles, hoping to spot next year's Capriati. This annual autumn event in Manhattan offers an evening of one-act plays by aspiring dramatists, who must be under 18 at the time of submission. The works, typically, are much ado about first love and sensitive, misunderstood youth; typically, also, at least one of the sketches shows potential genius struggling toward maturity. Through Oct. 6.

MAN RAY/BAZAAR YEARS. As these 140 works amply demonstrate, Man Ray bridged the worlds of surrealist art and fashion photography like no one else in this century. At New York City's International Center of Photography Midtown through Nov. 25.