Critics' Choice

TELEVISION

SHOOTER (NBC, Aug. 8, 9 p.m. EDT). They also served who only took the % pictures. TIME Photographer David Hume Kennerly was co-writer of this TV movie about combat photographers in Viet Nam.

THE TEN-YEAR LUNCH (PBS, Aug. 15, 9 p.m. on most stations). Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and the other literary legends who traded bons mots around the Algonquin Round Table are fondly recalled in this Academy Award-winning documentary.

BOOKS

THE LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON (Scribner's; $29.95). The writer's marvelously acute and poignant love letters, penned during an ill-fated mid-life affair, offer a new look at the private pains of a publicly triumphant life.

GROUND ZERO by Andrew Holleran (Morrow; $16.95). A tragicomic tour -- in the form of essays -- through Manhattan's once bustling gay night spots, now somber and charged with the emotional fallout of AIDS.

THEATER

THE FILM SOCIETY. Sad and fiercely funny, this off-Broadway tale of a frustrated teacher in South Africa heralds a striking new American playwright, Jon Robin Baitz, 25.

FRANKENSTEIN -- PLAYING WITH FIRE. The doctor tracks his doomed creation to the North Pole in a visually arresting, high-tech version, told in flashback, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

MUSIC

WOMACK & WOMACK: CONSCIENCE (Island). Soul that's sweet and stern simultaneously. Funky as it is, the music still goes down smooth -- and lingers.

WAGNER: HIGHLIGHTS FROM "THE RING" (CBS). Just in time for the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, West Germany, the short version. Montserrat Caballe sings the immolation scene; Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic in excerpts from the other three Ring operas.

CINEMA

BEST OF SUMMER '88

BIG. In this gentle fable, a twelve-year-old gets gonads overnight, and Tom Hanks proves himself the prince of '80s romantic comedy.

BULL DURHAM. What a couple! Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon debate philosophy, make love, live for baseball in the year's smartest comedy.

COMMISSAR. The liberation of this long-banned Soviet-made parable about a pregnant army officer is glasnost's greatest gift to movies.

A FISH CALLED WANDA. High-gloss farce is topped by Kevin Kline as an oafish jewel thief and John Cleese as a proper barrister gone bonkers.

MIDNIGHT RUN. A cross-country buddy movie may hold little promise, but Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin hold this one together.

WINGS OF DESIRE. An angel, lured by human voices, falls in love and to earth. A timeless fantasy from West Germany's Wim Wenders.