Critics' Voices

THEATER

BESIDE HERSELF. If you were an off-Broadway producer who had hired movie star William Hurt, would you cast him as a crude, subliterate UPS deliveryman who has little to do, and less to say, in a fantasy piece centered on a pathetic and prematurely old widow? If so, you would disappoint audiences as keenly as New York City's Circle Repertory is doing.

AUGUST SNOW. Novelist Reynolds Price proves a born playwright in a poignant trilogy (the other plays: Night Dance, Better Days) about thwarted hopes in a small North Carolina town; superbly staged by the Cleveland Playhouse.

MASTERGATE. The President dozes away his afternoons. A paranoid National Security Adviser travels by Stealth bomber. The true head of Government is a secretive CIA director who also happens to be dead. Larry Gelbart's fiercely funny Broadway satire lampoons events that made the evening news the sharpest comedy on TV. Joseph Daly is a dead-on George Bush, and the dialogue is an S.J. Perelmanesque stream -- debased, obfuscatory and unconsciously self- condemning. Samples: "I wonder if I might ask the Senator to stop raking over dead horses"; "What did the President know, and does he have any idea that he knew it?" The lesson of recent scandals is both less and more alarming. If the bums are not thrown out, it is because an overly forgiving, or morally inert, American people allows them to stay.

MOVIES

MY LEFT FOOT. Christy Brown was a poor lad who battled cerebral palsy to become a painter and author. Daniel Day-Lewis' triumph is nearly as spectacular: to play Christy with a streak of fierce, black-Irish humor -- and without a drop of TV-movie treacle.

THE BEAR. When it comes to technique, this wondrous movie is to other nature films what Star Wars was to science fiction: a redefinition of the state of the art. Even the most sophisticated filmgoers will be enchanted by this ursine tale, told from a bear's point of view.

MUSIC

DANIEL LANOIS: ACADIE (Opal/Warner Bros.). Record producers, even those as skillful as Lanois (U2, Dylan), usually come up with eccentric gewgaws when they perform on their own. But here is an exception: Lanois' music is minimal, mystical, folklike but decidedly unfolksy. No wonder he runs with the big boys.

MICHAEL BOLTON: SOUL PROVIDER (Columbia). Singer-songwriter Bolton, a white rhythm-and-bluesman from New Haven, Conn., finally hits his stride here. High point: Georgia on My Mind, on which his uncanny four-octave range and gut- wrenching phrasing give Ray Charles a serious run for the money.

MILES DAVIS: AURA (Columbia). Miles used to play jazz -- a melody with a beat. Now he's into music whose electronically enhanced formlessness resembles nothing so much as the sound track of a space movie. That would be great if only we had the flick to go along with it.

ART

FRANCIS BACON, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington. Haunting emblems of the Age of Anxiety in the eminent British painter's distorted, isolated, sometimes silently screaming figures. Through Jan. 7.

MAKING THEIR MARK: WOMEN ARTISTS MOVE INTO THE MAINSTREAM 1970-85, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. These 87 artists have made their mark, but doesn't categorizing them in such a show only perpetuate their separateness? Through Dec. 31.

BOOKS

FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM by Umberto Eco (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $22.95). Eco has woven together a novel that is even more intricate and absorbing than his international best seller The Name of the Rose. Beneath its endlessly diverting surface, this book constitutes a litmus test for ways of looking at history and the world.

THE TIMES ATLAS OF WORLD HISTORY (Hammond; $85). This classic reference book, in its third edition, chronicles the history of mankind through striking visuals and concise narratives. The new version contains more than 600 handsome maps, as well as updated sections on both antiquity and modern times. A must for history buffs!

TELEVISION

MOYERS: THE PUBLIC MIND (PBS, debuting Nov. 8, 9 p.m. on most stations). Public TV's resident big-think man is back with a four-part series on the role of image in modern life, especially as revealed through the media.

POLLY (NBC, Nov. 12, 7 p.m. EST). Will a batch of new songs and The Cosby Show's Keshia Knight Pulliam be able to improve on the old Disney film about an orphan with a cheery outlook? Don't be a Pollyanna!

SMALL SACRIFICES (ABC, Nov. 12, 14, 9 p.m. EST). Farrah Fawcett, whose Charlie's Angels days are an ever fading memory, plays an Oregon mother accused of shooting her own children in another ripped-from-the-headlines mini-series.