Critics' Voices

By TIME''s Reviewers. Compiled by Andrea Sachs

MOVIES

THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. As a play starring monologist Lily Tomlin, this was a solo dazzle and a terrific human comedy. Through a dozen or so characters, it provided a panoramic 20-year history of American womanhood. Her film version displays volcanic emotions, precisely explored.

BARTON FINK. The work of two gifted brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen (Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing), this was the first film ever to accomplish the hat trick at the Cannes festival -- Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The Coens revise the legend of innocent talent corrupted by Hollywood.

ART

HOMECOMING: WILLIAM H. JOHNSON AND AFRO-AMERICA, 1938-1946. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. These 80 paintings showcase one of America's most important but neglected painters. His works portray black experience, from the cotton patches to dance halls to city streets, in a primitive, folk-inspired style. Through March 1. A splendidly illustrated companion book, Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (Rizzoli; $45), provides a comprehensive look at his life and work.

BOOKS

HARLOT'S GHOST by Norman Mailer (Random House; $30). This huge (1,300-plus pages) novel starts off briskly with some Mailerian melodrama and metaphysics and then bogs down in a recapitulation of one man's life in the CIA from the middle 1950s to the early '60s. It ends with the three most ominous words in recent American literature: "TO BE CONTINUED."

SCARLETT by Alexandra Ripley (Warner Books; $24.95). This gilding-the- cornflowe r sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind is at last in the bookstores, amid megabucks of hype. And frankly, my dear, it's not worth a damn.

TELEVISION

CHILDHOOD (PBS, debuting Oct. 14, 8 p.m. on most stations). This seven-week series takes a broad cross-cultural look at the process of growing up. If the psychological insights don't win you over, the cute babies will.

THE WORLD SERIES (CBS, starting Oct. 19, 8 p.m. EDT). CBS has thus far taken a beanball in the ratings with its expensive baseball package. But a seven-game Series would go a long way toward making the network feel better.

DYNASTY: THE REUNION (ABC, Oct. 20 and 22, 9 p.m. EDT). And while the Series unfolds, ABC and NBC are counterprogramming with a slew of female-oriented movies and mini-series. Here, the Carringtons and Colbys return for a fresh segment of Lifestyles of the Rich and Once-Famous.

MUSIC

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY AND THE ASBURY JUKES: BETTER DAYS (Impact). Juke-joint Nirvana, with Southside smoking his way through 11 smash tunes, mostly written by Little Steven Van Zandt, and holding his own with some heavy company, including Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. When Springsteen joins Johnny and Little Steven to sing It's Been a Long Time, you can hear friendship recalled and solidified -- and a touch of history being made.

THE ALLEN TOUSSAINT COLLECTION (Reprise). The king of New Orleans R. and B. -- one of the great all-time musical figures, in fact, in a town where legends come around as regularly as lunchtime. This is a package of 16 solid sides, including From a Whisper to a Scream and What Do You Want the Girl to Do?, culled from his middle-period, major-label work. The very definition of funk; if you don't know Toussaint, your ears have never been baptized.

MISA FLAMENCA (Nimbus). Guitarist Paco Pena has adapted the texts of the Roman Catholic liturgy and set them to the extroverted melodic and rhythmic emotions of flamenco to compose this earthy, passionate Mass. His musicians and singers charismatically express love of freedom, resignation under oppression and an unconquerable faith that soars from an anguished soul.

THEATER

INHERIT THE WIND. What better way to celebrate the Bill of Rights' 200th anniversary than to revive this drama about the clash between freedom of speech and freedom of religion in Tennessee's 1925 "monkey trial" about evolution? Staged five times a weekend through Dec. 15 in an actual courtroom of Philadelphia City Hall, it features Malachy McCourt as William Jennings Bryan, and Jason Miller, Pulitzer-prizewinning author of That Championship Season, as his adversary, Clarence Darrow.

OUR LADY OF THE TORTILLA. When he's not winning Emmys for writing Sesame Street, Luis Santeiro is a shrewd satirist of fellow Cuban Americans, as in this off-Broadway piece about a woman's religious vision arising from scorch marks on her dinner.

ETCETERA

SPACESHIP EARTH (Worldlink). Tales of deforestation and ozone depletion set to the music of Sting, the B-52s and Ziggy Marley. This superb TV primer on the threats to planet Earth, now available on home video, is simple enough for children to understand and compelling enough to make their parents pay attention as well.

RETURN TO THE FORBIDDEN PLANET

Maybe the college professors think Shakespeare produced only 37 plays, but this off-Broadway lark is the Bard's long-lost science-fiction rock musical. Small of scale and free of spirit, it features the obligatory mad monster, fair maiden, evil scientist and heroic space pilot. Sci-fi junkies will recognize the plot from the 1956 MGM flick Forbidden Planet, which the more literary-minded in turn saw as an amalgam of Shakespeare's The Tempest and dime-store Freud. (The killer demons were escapees from the id of a man who, like most sci-fi antiheroes, tried to play God.) Writer-director Bob Carlton blended that cult-movie narrative with snippets of dialogue, some in blank verse (and occasionally in blank mind), and a stompfest of '50s and '60s rock standards (Shake, Rattle and Roll; Great Balls of Fire; Born to Be Wild). London bestowed on it the Olivier award, passing over Miss Saigon and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love. Now the song and story are back where they were born, in the U.S.A., and it all makes for a delightfully silly evening.