Critics' Voices

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.