Critics’ Choice: Aug. 8, 1988

TELEVISION

SHOOTER (NBC, Aug. 8, 9 p.m. EDT). They also served who only took the % pictures. TIME Photographer David Hume Kennerly was co-writer of this TV movie about combat photographers in Viet Nam.

THE TEN-YEAR LUNCH (PBS, Aug. 15, 9 p.m. on most stations). Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and the other literary legends who traded bons mots around the Algonquin Round Table are fondly recalled in this Academy Award-winning documentary.

BOOKS

THE LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON (Scribner’s; $29.95). The writer’s marvelously acute and poignant love letters, penned during an ill-fated mid-life affair, offer a new look at the private pains of a publicly triumphant life.

GROUND ZERO by Andrew Holleran (Morrow; $16.95). A tragicomic tour — in the form of essays — through Manhattan’s once bustling gay night spots, now somber and charged with the emotional fallout of AIDS.

THEATER

THE FILM SOCIETY. Sad and fiercely funny, this off-Broadway tale of a frustrated teacher in South Africa heralds a striking new American playwright, Jon Robin Baitz, 25.

FRANKENSTEIN — PLAYING WITH FIRE. The doctor tracks his doomed creation to the North Pole in a visually arresting, high-tech version, told in flashback, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

MUSIC

WOMACK & WOMACK: CONSCIENCE (Island). Soul that’s sweet and stern simultaneously. Funky as it is, the music still goes down smooth — and lingers.

WAGNER: HIGHLIGHTS FROM “THE RING” (CBS). Just in time for the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, West Germany, the short version. Montserrat Caballe sings the immolation scene; Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic in excerpts from the other three Ring operas.

CINEMA

BEST OF SUMMER ’88

BIG. In this gentle fable, a twelve-year-old gets gonads overnight, and Tom Hanks proves himself the prince of ’80s romantic comedy.

BULL DURHAM. What a couple! Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon debate philosophy, make love, live for baseball in the year’s smartest comedy.

COMMISSAR. The liberation of this long-banned Soviet-made parable about a pregnant army officer is glasnost’s greatest gift to movies.

A FISH CALLED WANDA. High-gloss farce is topped by Kevin Kline as an oafish jewel thief and John Cleese as a proper barrister gone bonkers.

MIDNIGHT RUN. A cross-country buddy movie may hold little promise, but Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin hold this one together.

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WINGS OF DESIRE. An angel, lured by human voices, falls in love and to earth. A timeless fantasy from West Germany’s Wim Wenders.