Critics' Voices

By TIME''s Reviewers. Compiled by Linda Williams

MUSIC

ENO/CALE: WRONG WAY UP (Opal/Warner Bros.). Of course it's weird: 10 tunes that are part madman mumblings, part hip mantras. The music is spooky and melodic, however, and everything that seems strange at first starts very quickly to sound almost everyday -- if every day is like a dream.

SHIRLEY HORN: YOU WON'T FORGET ME (Verve). Her voice is sultry, voluptuous, plaintive; her piano work both driving and delicate. Combine them with brilliant backing by the likes of Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis (separate tracks, please), and you get one of the most exciting performances by a jazz singer since the heyday of the late Sarah Vaughan.

HOWARD HANSON: SYMPHONIES NO. 3 & NO. 6 (Delos). Gerard Schwarz, one of America's most lucid and least hackneyed conductors, leads the Seattle Symphony and the New York Chamber Symphony in galvanizing interpretations of these ruggedly intense, expansive and unapologetically romantic compositions that bare Hanson's musical debt to Sibelius and Grieg.

MOVIES

THE GRIFTERS. Cold and merciless as an assassin's blade, this adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1963 novel traces the slug tracks of three con artists who play their deadliest tricks on one another. Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening make two splendid carnivores; John Cusack, as the man trying to tame them, naturally gets devoured.

COME SEE THE PARADISE. Director Alan Parker may have intended this story -- about Japanese Americans interned during World War II -- as atonement for his factitious Mississippi Burning. The subject is compelling, but this time Parker left out the drama.

GREEN CARD. In his first big Hollywood film, French superstar Gerard Depardieu cheerfully goes slumming with sex, lies, and videotape's Andie MacDowell. Peter Weir's comedy offers a little charm, less story and virtually no movie.

TELEVISION

THE COLORED MUSEUM (PBS, Feb. 1, 9 p.m. on most stations). George C. Wolfe's off-Broadway satire of black racial stereotypes makes its TV debut in a Great Performances production starring Danitra Vance and Loretta Devine.

SUNDAY BEST (NBC, debuting Feb. 3, 7 p.m. EST). Better (or, at least, cheaper) programming through recycling: Carl Reiner is host of a weekly variety show that will feature, among other comedy segments, highlights from last week's NBC shows.

SARAH, PLAIN AND TALL (CBS, Feb. 3, 9 p.m. EST). Glenn Close plays a mail- order mother, circa 1910, who moves West to help a widowed farmer ! (Christopher Walken) take care of his two children. Another huggably homespun Hallmark Hall of Fame drama, enhanced by two sincere performances.

THEATER

ABSENT FRIENDS. Mary-Louise Parker, who made last year's most stunning Broadway debut as a seductively slow-spoken ingenue in Prelude to a Kiss, heads the off-Broadway cast of Alan Ayckbourn's dark comedy about suicide and fatal illness.

THE WHITE ROSE. Hitler and the Nazi era continue to fascinate playwrights as a metaphor for evil, both in witless flops like off-Broadway's A Bright Room Called Day and in poignant efforts like this world premiere at San Diego's Old Globe.

GUV: THE MUSICAL. If you've been missing Evan Mecham, Arizona's malaprop Governor who alienated practically everybody until his impeachment in 1988, you can savor again those Archie Bunkeresque remarks about gays, "pickaninnies" and Martin Luther King Jr. in this musical satire by Tempe's Mill Avenue Theater.

ART

HENRY OSSAWA TANNER, Philadelphia Museum of Art. The first major U.S. show devoted to Tanner (1859-1937), a pioneering black artist who fled American racial prejudice to live in Paris, where he won renown for his deeply human depictions of biblical scenes. Through April 14.

PICASSO, BRAQUE, GRIS, LEGER: DOUGLAS COOPER COLLECTING CUBISM, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. More than 80 representative works acquired by a friend of the artists, ranging from Picasso's Three Figures Under a Tree (1907-08) to Fernand Leger's 1936 painting Composition. Jan. 31 to April 28.

BOOKS

PATRIMONY by Philip Roth (Simon & Schuster; $19.95). The trick of this account of how the author cared for his dying father is that there is no trick, only a masterly demonstration of narrative control and emotional clarity that can evoke laughter and tears -- sometimes simultaneously.

DICKENS by Peter Ackroyd (HarperCollins; $35). An old-fashioned narrative biography that attempts to understand the great 19th century writer, both as an interpreter of his times and as one of the most unlikely literary geniuses of any time.

RED BLUES

A grouchy cabdriver and a dissolute Jewish saxophonist strike up an uneasy friendship, with the cabby doggedly trying to reform the jazzman. TAXI BLUES doesn't sound like anything new, does it? The movie takes its story from Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 Round Midnight and its urgent, improvisatory spirit from a dozen John Cassavetes pictures. But Pavel Lounguine's drama is remarkable as the first (and perhaps last?) post-glasnost film from the Soviet Union. Lounguine proudly airs Russia's dirty laundry: the pervasive alcoholism, the anti-Semitism, the suspicion and self-destruction. Rock star Piotr Mamonov has a snaky charisma as the musician, and American tenor-sax legend Hal Singer blesses the project with his presence. At last May's Cannes Film Festival, Taxi Blues won the best-director prize. Today it has both news and nostalgic value. We can hear it wail, in a minor key, from the sweet and recent past: the early days of Soviet freedom, which seem only a prelude to the birth of the blues.