Critics' Voices

By TIME''s Reviewers. Compiled by Linda Williams

MOVIES

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. One day your kids will be taking their kids to this sumptuous Disney cartoon. Adults will be touched too, by a parable about the tyranny of convention and the liberation of love. It's also about magic mirrors, singing candlesticks and the art of drawing pictures that move people. A fairy tale for all ages.

PROSPERO'S BOOKS. Shakespeare illustrated by Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover). Not the British director's best film but certainly his most: two chockablock hours of Sir John Gielgud intoning The Tempest while surrounded by naked babes and boys. It's as if God lived in the Playboy Mansion. The true version of this coffee-table film is the accompanying book: script, photos and drawings.

MALA NOCHE. Come to the wild side of . . . well, Portland, Ore., for a drugged-out slice of lice in artfully grungy black and white. The first feature by Gus Van Sant, who was later beloved by critics for Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, this 1988 homo-erratic melodrama remains his boldest and best.

BOOKS

THE RUNAWAY SOUL by Harold Brodkey (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30). Perhaps the most anticipated first novel in history, the volatile short-story writer's magnum opus -- nearly 30 years in the making -- is at times precious, incoherent and self-indulgent.

A THOUSAND ACRES by Jane Smiley (Knopf; $23). Based on a family feud over inherited farmland in Iowa, this modern-day King Lear has an exhilarating sense of place and a sheer Americanness that give it its own soul and roots.

TELEVISION

MTV 10 (ABC, Nov. 27, 9 p.m. EST). Michael Jackson, Madonna and a few other stars you may have heard of join in the music channel's 10th anniversary celebration.

E.T., THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (CBS, Nov. 28, 8 p.m. EST). The most popular movie of all time makes its television debut -- on Thanksgiving night, when many families are otherwise occupied. Looks like it will be pumpkin pie in front of the tube this year.

GARRISON KEILLOR'S HOME (PBS, Nov. 29, 9 p.m. on most stations). Lake Wobegon's favorite son brings his folksy radio humor to TV in the first of three specials. Along with a Keillor monologue on the death of Buddy Holly, Bobby McFerrin offers a nifty a cappella version of The Wizard of Oz.

MUSIC

PHIL SPECTOR: BACK TO MONO (1958-1969) (Phil Spector Records Inc./Abkco). The Wagner of rock, celebrating his own Wall of Sound glory, in a four-CD box featuring 60 of his biggest hits and wildest productions. This is rock at its grandest and giddiest. Spanning nearly a quarter-century, classics like Be My Baby and Then He Kissed Me are three-minute operas of teen passion, which have endured because of the grandeur and unapologetic delirium of the Spector style. His production techniques are elaborate and near legendary, but even if they could be duplicated, it wouldn't be the same. The Wall of Sound may have been created in the studio, but it's truly the fragile insulation around Spector's wild heart.

MAJEK FASHEK: SPIRIT OF LOVE (Interscope). Well, as Bob Marley used to sing, "one love, one heart." Here's a wonderful, soulful singer from Nigeria who's a master of those gentle African rhythms from which Paul Simon drew such inspiration. Fashek sounds distinctly Jamaican into the bargain -- not unlike Marley, in fact -- and writes funky tunes with a spry political spirit and a winning sense of humor.

O MISTRESS MINE (Dorian Recordings). These 27 English lute songs, many composed by John Dowland (1563-1626), possess a timeless charm and pith that are captured with effortless grace by the remarkable lutenist Ronn McFarlane and Frederick Urrey's sweet tenor.

THEATER

PERICLES. Last year film star Campbell Scott (Longtime Companion, Dying Young) was an extraordinary Hamlet at San Diego's Old Globe, proving himself a fit heir to his parents, George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst. Now he is at New York City's Public Theater, portraying another Shakespearean royal in a psychologically rich but chaotic narrative, perhaps the Bard's weakest.

NIGHT DANCE. Novelist Reynolds Price (Kate Vaiden) proved himself a splendid playwright in New Music, a trilogy about the tarnishing and disillusionment of a golden boy. Staged at the Cleveland Play House in 1989, it deserved a wider life. Now at least the poignant middle play is being mounted off-Broadway.

THE POINT. Harry Nilsson's 1971 animated video fantasy about prejudice has been imaginatively adapted for a small stage in Los Angeles. The show, equally suitable for children and parents, blends broad acting, balloon characters, Bunraku-style puppetry, fog effects, strobe lighting and choreography by former Martha Graham troupe member Janet Eilber.

MY YIDDISHE MOMA

They were made in Poland, Austria, the Soviet Union and even rural New Jersey, but they spoke a common language to a most uncommon people. They were YIDDISH FILMS -- affectionate, often artless, now priceless curios of the '20s and '30s. In musicals (like Molly Picon's charming Yiddle with His Fiddle) and melodramas (Maurice Schwartz's powerful Uncle Moses), they traced the wanderings of Jews from the village shtetl to the urban ghetto and beyond. During World War II, the genre nearly vanished, along with many of those who produced and patronized it. As director Joseph Green says in the new documentary The Yiddish Cinema, "Six million of my best customers perished." Never again. Thanks to restoration magic performed by the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, this movie heritage is being celebrated in a 38-feature retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), through Jan. 14, and in an invaluable critical history, J. Hoberman's Bridge of Light (Schocken Books; $40). Go. Read. Enjoy. It couldn't hurt.