Critics' Choice

TELEVISON

EVERYBODY'S BABY: THE RESCUE OF JESSICA MCCLURE (ABC, May 21, 9 p.m. EDT). Her Texas neighbors quarreled over the TV rights, but the story of 18-month-old Jessica's ordeal in a well was bound to reach the screen, come hell or high water. Beau Bridges and Patty Duke co-star in the docudrama.

MIAMI VICE (NBC, May 21, 9 p.m. EDT). The high-style cop show that defined TV noir for the '80s ends its five-year war on drugs with a two-hour finale. The ending is hush-hush, but the network says Crockett and Tubbs (Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas) will make their "last stand together." Uh-oh.

MUSIC

BEETHOVEN: CELLO SONATAS 3 & 5 (EMI). The preternaturally gifted cellist Jacqueline Du Pre exudes sensitivity and breathtaking virtuosity as she teams up with pianist Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich on this digital reissue.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG: THE HOT FIVES & HOT SEVENS, VOLUME III (Columbia). Young "Satch" at the peak of his force and creative genius. Featuring Johnny Dodds, Kid Ory and Earl Hines, these 16 digitally remastered sides from 1927 and 1928 spearhead the latest batch of releases in Columbia's outstanding Jazz Masterpieces series.

PHOEBE SNOW: SOMETHING REAL (Elektra). Real is right: ten raw and lyrical bits of musical autobiography from one of the '70s' best singer-songwriters. On the evidence, she should be flourishing in the '90s too.

MOVIES

LOVERBOY. Delivering pizza in Beverly Hills offers all sorts of erotic opportunities -- and comic ones too -- in this cheeky romantic romp. Patrick Dempsey has the charm, and director Joan Micklin Silver the knack, to bring off a modern farce in the classic style.

< SCANDAL. It's all here: the loveless romances of Christine Keeler with a Soviet spy, a Jamaican drug dealer and John Profumo, Secretary of War in Harold Macmillan's Cabinet. This express tour through swinging London plays like News of the World headlines set to early '60s rock 'n' roll.

MISS FIRECRACKER. Holly Hunter reprises her stage role as a lovelorn orphan determined to win a beauty contest. Mary Steenburgen and Alfre Woodard also shine in Beth Henley's comedy about the danger of holding on to youthful dreams and the liberating effect of letting them go.

THEATER

LARGELY NEW YORK. Lanky, limber Bill Irwin, silent in this 70-minute Broadway sketchbook, owes much to Jacques Tati and Marcel Marceau, but gags about man's obsessive relations with machines still work in a Walkman world.

ELEEMOSYNARY. Playwright Lee Blessing (A Walk in the Woods) encapsulates feminism through three generations of strong-minded women in a deft, dark off- Broadway comedy.

ARISTOCRATS. Brian Friel's depiction of a gilded Irish clan in decline, sensitively acted off-Broadway, is the best play on view in New York City and merits comparison with Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

ART

NOMADS: MASTERS OF THE EURASIAN STEPPE, Denver Museum of Natural History. The patterns of daily life among the ancient nomadic tribes of Central Asia are vividly reconstructed in this archaeological and ethnographic exhibit mounted by the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. June 4 through Sept. 18.

MASTERPIECES OF IMPRESSIONISM AND POSTIMPRESSIONISM: THE ANNENBERG COLLECTION, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Fifty prime paintings by artists from Van Gogh and Cezanne through Gauguin and Braque, acquired over the past four decades by publisher Walter Annenberg and his wife. May 21 through Sept. 17.

BOOKS

CITIZEN WELLES by Frank Brady (Scribner's; $24.95). Anecdote and scholarship are nicely balanced in this new biography of Orson Welles, whose roller- coaster career in stage, screen and radio covered the spectrum from classics to commercials.

T.E. LAWRENCE: THE SELECTED LETTERS, edited by Malcolm Brown (Norton; $27.50). David Lean's recently rereleased Lawrence of Arabia is one of the greatest epic films ever made. But its subject remains an enigma. He tells his own story here in letters, nearly two-thirds of them previously unpublished, and illuminates the shadows of his personality.

COLLECTED POEMS by Philip Larkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22.50). The pre- eminent poet of his time, Larkin died in 1985 at age 63. This collection includes works previously unpublished or unavailable in book form, and documents the triumph of a poet who found his style by lowering his voice.