Critics' Voices

By TIME''s Reviewers. Compiled by Andrea Sachs

TELEVISION

WIOU (CBS, debuting Oct. 24, 10 p.m. EDT). Yet another network series about TV's favorite subject: itself. John Shea plays the news director of a struggling station, where a pompous anchorman (Harris Yulin) paws female reporters under the desk. Lou Grant would have furloughed them all.

MOTHER LOVE (PBS, debuting Oct. 25, 9 p.m. on most stations). Diana Rigg, classy host of PBS's Mystery! series, gets into the whodunit herself this time, playing a scheming woman who adores her son (James Wilby) as much as she hates his father (David McCallum).

MUSIC

NEIL YOUNG AND CRAZY HORSE: RAGGED GLORY (Reprise). Yes, yes, Neil Young's been through more changes than the Dow Jones industrial average, but when he locks in, he's tough to beat. He locks in here. Backed by his favorite band, Young cooks up his best set in years: the sound is rough-hewn as ever, and all the fury is intact.

JOHN JARVIS: PURE CONTOURS (MCA). Ten cuts to make the local fern bar tolerable. This Nashville keyboardist is so uncannily adept and writes such stay-put melodic riffs, he's likely to give New Age music a good name. He can certainly make it swing and even -- stand back -- rock a little.

THEATER

MISS EVERS' BOYS. Kenny Leon, new artistic director of Atlanta's Alliance Theater, is only the second black to run a major regional theater. In a splendid staging of this true story about a government syphilis experiment in which blacks went untreated, he demonstrates his great gifts.

THE MISER. Philip Bosco does everything one could ask in the title role of Moliere's satire, except the indispensable: lurch into believable love-struck madness when his cherished cashbox is stolen. Other actors in this Broadway revival swoop and flutter and generally diminish the text, save for splendidly real and moving bits by John Christopher Jones as a long-suffering servant and Adam Redfield as a splenetic one.

BOOKS

RABBIT AT REST by John Updike (Knopf; $21.95). Harold ("Rabbit") Angstrom is 56 and ailing in what the author says is his farewell to the character whose life, from high school basketball star to successful Toyota dealer, mirrors middle-class America of the past four decades.

BURGUNDY by Robert M. Parker Jr. (Simon & Schuster; $39.95). A magisterial but awkwardly organized tasting guide to recent vintages from this French province by America's leading wine critic. Parker, as always, is pungently direct in designating picks and pans: a 1985 Romanee-Conti, scored a perfect 100, is "utterly mind-blowing," while a 1987 Echezeaux, rated 69, is "woody, stemmy, green and thin."

ART

COURTLY SPLENDOR: TWELVE CENTURIES OF TREASURES FROM JAPAN, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. To celebrate the enthronement of Japan's new Emperor, Akihito, a selection of 60 objects -- among them scrolls, sculpture and a lacquered wood saddle with inlaid mother-of-pearl -- illustrating the court's role as a patron of the arts. Through Nov. 25.

MEXICO: SPLENDORS OF THIRTY CENTURIES, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. This monumental show bites off more than it -- or you -- can chew. But it makes you want to go to Mexico, to know this vast, vivid, fierce visual culture better. Through Jan. 13.

MOVIES

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. A high comedy of manners about Claus and Sunny von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as if they were Noel Coward lovers gone to hell in a Lamborghini. The death-styles of the rich and famous have rarely been portrayed with such cauterizing sympathy.

TO SLEEP WITH ANGER. A charming wastrel (Danny Glover) brings the dark past into the restless heart of a middle-class black family. Charles Burnett's drama is an acute and beautifully played evocation of the down-home ghosts that may haunt and taunt any urban family.

ETCETERA

THE VOYAGE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE, by Dominick Argento. Encouraging news for American composers. This 1976 work, one of the finest American operas ever, gets a new production from the Chicago Lyric Opera. Through Nov. 19.

NEXT WAVE/NEXT DOOR. The Brooklyn Academy of Music's supersmart, avant-garde Next Wave Festival presents four theater and dance troupes from Montreal, all of them attuned to BAM's exploration of new forces in art. Through Nov. 18.

WHITE OAK DANCE PROJECT. Boston is the kickoff town for this 18-city tour of new works by the brilliant young modern choreographer Mark Morris. The big draw? Mikhail Baryshnikov, who will dance every night. Other cities include Minneapolis, Toledo, Savannah, Miami and Detroit. Through Nov. 19.

THREE RIFFS ON A SOULMAN

LISTEN UP: THE LIVES OF QUINCY JONES. Who is this guy with the omnipresent name? There are now three chances to find out: an audacious documentary directed by Ellen Weissbrod, currently in theatrical release (Warner Bros.); a book, which expands with razzle-dazzle graphics the biographical contents of the film; and a CD (Qwest/Reprise), packaged with the book, which represents the first-ever compilation of Jones' polymorphous music, ranging from jazz to soul, pop to funk, performed by talents as various as Sarah Vaughan and James Ingram. The movie, the book and the CD, all produced and coordinated by Courtney Sale Ross, offer no definitive portrait. But they do provide a vivid personality sketch in bold -- and, in the film, often demanding and dazzling -- strokes of a man who's written and played fine music, produced films (The Color Purple) and records (Michael Jackson's Thriller) and generally become an immutable force of show-business nature. Sort of a David O. Selznick as soulman.