Critics' Voices

FESTIVALS

INTERNATIONAL BALLOON FESTIVAL. More hot air than any convention on earth. Hundreds of giant rainbow-hued balloons converge on Albuquerque (or just above it) for the largest annual ballooning extravaganza. Oct. 7 to 15.

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL. If the avant garde has any tradition, this is it. The % Brooklyn Academy of Music's seventh annual festival of cutting-edge music and dance features performance artist Laurie Anderson's new solo piece, Empty Places, and a musical tribute to Andy Warhol by Velvet Underground veterans. Through Dec. 3.

MOVIES

QUEEN OF HEARTS. On a next-to-nothing budget, this criminally pleasurable panorama depicts a teeming gallery of Italians in postwar London. Funny, ambitious and a mite too long, Queen of Hearts laces pearls on a shoestring.

IN COUNTRY. A Viet Nam vet (Bruce Willis) reconciles himself to his niece (radiant Emily Lloyd) and his country. Sounds like your basic TV movie, sunk by noble intentions. But here well meaning translates into well done.

SEA OF LOVE. An infusion of wit and imagination raises this police film above the rank and file. One of New York's finest (Al Pacino) pursues a serial killer who is stalking womanizers; the likeliest suspect (Ellen Barkin) is also the best bet to comfort our hero.

MUSIC

MALCOLM MCLAREN AND THE BOOTZILLA ORCHESTRA: WALTZ DARLING (Epic). Berserk and beautiful: classical waltz music funked up for dancing by rock's baddest bad boy. McLaren is like a compact-disc version of Ken Russell -- funny, vulgar and endlessly inventive.

PETE TOWNSHEND: IRONMAN (Atlantic). A fabulistic -- if not fully fabulous -- rock musical, based on an allegory by poet Ted Hughes. The album may lack Tommy's delirium, but at its erratic best it has more soul.

MARIA MCKEE: MARIA MCKEE (Geffen). Love songs like crystal, done with some fancy collaborators (including Richard Thompson and Robbie Robertson) by a vocalist who can soar just fine on her own.

THEATER

LES MISERABLES. Tours often look tatty compared with the Broadway originals, but that's far from true of the glistening and passionate company now installed in Detroit. Notable among a solid cast are J. Mark McVey as Jean Valjean and the locally recruited children.

LOVE LETTERS. Kate Nelligan and Treat Williams are this week's stars in the rotating off-Broadway cast of A.R. Gurney's disarming tale of a half-century relationship lived out largely via pen and paper.

BOOKS

POODLE SPRINGS by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker (Putnam; $18.95). After 30 years of big sleep in the Chandler literary estate, a barely started Philip Marlowe novel is successfully completed by one of the mystery master's best imitators.

MILES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe (Simon & Schuster; $21.95). An as-told-to memoir by a protean genius of modern jazz who played with Bird, Diz and countless other legends. With all the uglies -- drugs, booze, women betrayed -- writ large.

BIG SUGAR by Alec Wilkinson (Knopf; $18.95). Every winter roughly 10,000 West Indian men come to harvest sugarcane by hand in South Florida. The author, a staff writer for the New Yorker, decided to see how these migrants earn their pay and came back with a story more bitter than sweet.

ART

FRANS HALS, National Gallery of Art, Washington. The great 17th century Dutch portraitist's bravura brushwork and piercing insight still bring figures to startling life. Incredibly, this is the first major show devoted to him outside the Netherlands. Through Dec. 31.

MARIO MERZ, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Who needs paint? Clay, wax, broken glass, twigs and neon tubes are just as likely to be used by Merz, an exponent of Italy's Arte Povera movement. Through Nov. 26.

MASTERWORKS OF LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY, Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Washington. Some 65 of the renowned glassmaker's most vibrant lamps, vases and windows. The ultimate glass act! Sept. 29 to March 4.

TELEVISION: POSTSEASON BASEBALL. If Vin Scully and Tony Kubek get misty eyed in the late innings this week and next, don't be surprised. NBC's coverage of the 1989 play-offs marks the end of an era. TV's premier baseball network is being sent to the showers. Indeed, network baseball in general is getting a dunking. Next season CBS takes over major-league baseball's broadcast rights (currently divided between NBC and ABC) but will deliver only twelve games, plus the play-offs and the World Series. That means Saturday-afternoon-at-the- ball-park broadcasts (begun on NBC in 1957) will no longer be a weekly freebie. Those sports fans who do not have cable now have another reason to get wired: ESPN will be filling in the gaps with some 175 games next season.