Critics' Choice

ART

HELEN FRANKENTHALER: A PAINTINGS RETROSPECTIVE, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. In the '50s Frankenthaler's lyrical washes of color had a decisive influence on abstract expressionism; today she ranks as America's best-known living woman artist. These 40 canvases from four decades show why. Through Aug. 20.

L'ART DE VIVRE: DECORATIVE ARTS AND DESIGN IN FRANCE, 1789-1989, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York City. Jewelry commissioned by Napoleon, cutlery from Maxim's, art nouveau furniture and haute couture gowns are among 500 objects displayed in glittering tribute to France's bicentennial. Through July 16.

MUSIC

CLINT BLACK: KILLIN' TIME (RCA). Real nice, unassuming go-to-meeting country music by a new Nashville hotshot. Black sounds like Randy Travis with a few more years of book learning, and he's got a knack for cozy melodies too.

SCHUBERT: IMPROMPTUS (EMI). Pianist Melvyn Tan combines remarkable technical precision with a romantic sensibility in his fresh interpretations of these Schubert perennials.

10,000 MANIACS: BLIND MAN'S ZOO (Elektra). Love songs like petitions, songs of conscience that come straight from the heart. This is a band with folkie inclinations and rock grit, and a graceful way with a cry of pain: Poison in the Well, an unfortunately timely tune about environmental pollution, ought to be piped in to the Exxon boardroom.

MOVIES

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE. The adventure genre may be nearly exhausted, but producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg know how to make the thrills crack like Indy's bullwhip. Sean Connery and Harrison Ford find special star resonance in the bond between an aloof father and his heroic, hero-worshiping son.

DEAD POETS SOCIETY.

Robin Williams is a Mr. Chips with a mission: to inspire his '50s prep school students with reckless passion. Like director Peter Weir, Williams is dead ) serious this time, donating his celebrity to an imperfect but valuable adolescent drama.

SCENES FROM THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN BEVERLY HILLS. Not much class but plenty of struggle at the Lipkin mansion, where everybody upstairs sleeps with everybody downstairs. The setting is swank, the appetites gross in director Paul Bartel's clever comedy of sexual manners.

THEATER

CYMBELINE. A mildly punkish off-Broadway version of Shakespeare's odd tragedy stars Oscar nominee Joan Cusack (Working Girl) as a wife wrongly accused of infidelity.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH. Grittier than the movie, as panoramic as Steinbeck's novel, this 35-actor adaptation by Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe lights up California's La Jolla Playhouse stage on the way to a late-June run at London's National Theater.

MIXED BLESSINGS. Luis Santeiro deftly adapts Moliere's Tartuffe into a loving lampoon of life among nouveau riche Cuban Americans in contemporary Miami, at that city's Coconut Grove Playhouse.

BOOKS

THE GOOD TIMES by Russell Baker (Morrow; $19.95). What propelled Baker from the childhood he so memorably described in Growing Up (1982) to his present distinction as a columnist for the New York Times? Here is the answer, in a winsome memoir of his early newspaper days, including big-league stints in London and Washington.

THE RUSSIA HOUSE by John le Carre (Knopf; $19.95). A document discounting Soviet missile capabilities is smuggled to the West. Never mind glasnost, perestroika and the cold war thaw. Are these grubby notebooks full of facts and figures true? The quest for the answer produces the author's most hair- raising thriller since The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.

SUMMER OF '49 by David Halberstam (Morrow; $21.95). A quirky and informal account of the American League pennant race between the Red Sox and the Yankees deepens into a nostalgic memoir of a vanishing era, when people listened to the radio, traveled by train and went around the corner to see a movie.

TELEVISION

COAST TO COAST (Showtime, June 17, 11 p.m. EDT). Singers Kenny Loggins and Linda Ronstadt, country stylist Lyle Lovett and jazz pianist Harry Connick Jr. provide eclectic sounds for a summer night in this edition of the occasional music series.

FIRING LINE SPECIAL DEBATE (PBS, June 19, 9 p.m. on most stations). "Resolved: The Cold War Is Not Coming to an End." Conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. is joined by former Secretary of State and NATO chief Alexander Haig in arguing the pro side. Former presidential contenders George McGovern and Gary Hart disagree.