Critics' Choice

THEATER

RICHARD III. Ontario's Stratford Festival shows why it has become the biggest repertory company in North America in this robust 51-actor staging. Colm Feore cackles, skitters and charms as Shakespeare's bottled-spider King.

BROADWAY BOUND. Joan Rivers acts? Yes, and she does just fine as the mother in Neil Simon's subtle, thoughtful and funny look at his youth.

AIN'T MISBEHAVIN'. The joint is jumpin', again: the jubilant Fats Waller songbook that won three 1978 Tony Awards returns to Broadway with the original cast.

BOOKS

WHEAT THAT SPRINGETH GREEN by J.F. Powers (Knopf; $18.95). Father Joe Hackett, assigned in the late 1960s to a comfortable suburban parish, struggles to keep his mind on eternity while coping with the nigglings of bureaucracy.

LIBRA by Don DeLillo (Viking; $19.95). Another conspiracy theory about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this one fictional, mingling real people like Lee Harvey Oswald with an imaginary cabal of disgruntled CIA types.

MUSIC

RICHARD THOMPSON: AMNESIA (Capitol). He's a monster guitar player and a master songwriter, touching top form again on this brand-new album.

CHESS (RCA Victor). You missed the show, now buy the record: not a rock musical at all, but the most eclectic score of the '80s and the hottest night in Bangkok since Yul Brynner met Deborah Kerr.

NIELSEN: SYMPHONY NO. 5; MASQUERADE (CBS). Somebody has to make a case for Carl Nielsen, and Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen certainly does, both in the strikingly original symphony and the dazzling excerpts from the opera.

TELEVISION

NOVA (PBS, Sept. 6, 8 p.m. on most stations). TV's longest-running science series launches its 16th season with a four-part look at the development of modern surgery.

MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS (MTV, Sept. 7, 9 p.m. EDT). George Harrison, Bruce Springsteen and U2 are among those vying for top prizes in the music channel's glitzy awards show.

USA TODAY: THE TELEVISION SHOW (syndicated, debuting Sept. 12). MOST OF US ARE TIRED OF DULL NETWORK NEWS. At least, that's the operating principle behind this much touted video version of McPaper, which will offer a zippy nightly wrap-up of news, sports and features.

CINEMA

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. There was a movie buried under all the pre- release protest. Now that ticket lines are replacing picket lines, Martin Scorsese's film can be seen as a full-bodied meditation on Jesus' humanity. And a terrific movie.

TUCKER. Francis Ford Coppola fashions a grand entertainment from the heroic efforts of Preston Tucker to market his 1947 "car of tomorrow."

MARRIED TO THE MOB. Another brand of all-American capitalism, the Mafia, takes its licks in Jonathan Demme's hip jape. Michelle Pfeiffer (swoon!) is a mob widow on the lam, and Dean Stockwell is tops as a henpecked gang lord.