Critics' Voices

THEATER

OUR COUNTRY'S GOOD. The acerbic antimilitary play, named London's best last season, gets double exposure: the original Royal Court version is at the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto, while the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles offers a U.S. premiere.

AUGUST SNOW. Revered novelist Reynolds Price debuts a trilogy at the Cleveland Play House (titles of the other works: Night Dance and Better Days).

MOVIES

DRUGSTORE COWBOY. Matt Dillon and friends go on a drug spree in Gus Van Sant's eye-catching tour of the lower depths. Dillon, a punk Montgomery Clift, is pure Acapulco gold as a smart addict who gets scared straight.

JOHNNY HANDSOME (Mickey Rourke) has the face of the Elephant Man and the brain of a perverse computer. Now all he needs to take his revenge on some suave double-crossers is a little plastic surgery. Walter Hill's thriller boasts a sturdy cast (Ellen Barkin, Morgan Freeman, Elizabeth McGovern) and a ripe sense of criminal ambiguity. Neat work!

BLACK RAIN. Michael Douglas glowers through this formulaic cop drama set in Japan. Director Ridley Scott can make anything -- a nightclub, a chase, a murder -- look sexy. But here he wastes his time -- and ours.

MUSIC

BORIS GREBENSHIKOV: RADIO SILENCE (Columbia). The title is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Grebenshikov, a dubious product of glasnost, sounds like David Bowie on Bosco as he thrashes his way -- in English -- through twelve pompous rock anthems as dense as the Iron Curtain but not quite so penetrable.

JAMES MCMURTRY: TOO LONG IN THE WASTELAND (Columbia). A fine debut album that fixes a bleary, jaundiced eye on the back roads and byways of small-town life. McMurtry turns a lyric with irony and precision, even if his voice can't carry a tune as far as the barn door.

BEETHOVEN: AN DIE FERNE GELIEBTE/BRAHMS: VIER ERNSTE GESAENGE (Deutsche Grammophon). Tenors, sopranos, basses, mezzos: eat your hearts out! The best classical singer since World War II is baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who proves it on this dazzling lieder collection.

TELEVISION

COMMON THREADS: STORIES FROM THE QUILT (HBO, Oct. 15, 18, 21, 24). Friends and family of five AIDS victims, whose lives are commemorated in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, reminisce poignantly in a documentary directed by Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk) and Jeffrey Friedman.

DO YOU KNOW THE MUFFIN MAN? (CBS, Oct. 22, 9 p.m. EDT). John Shea and Pam Dawber play the parents of a boy who has been abused at the friendly neighborhood day-care center.

NIGHT MUSIC (NBC, Mondays, 12:15 a.m. EDT). Assemble a handful of the best jazz, R.-and-B. and rock artists, and turn them loose in a weekly, hour-long musical showcase that has smooth-talking alto saxman David Sanborn as host. Result: the best damn music show on television. Look for Eric Clapton, Robert Cray and Taj Mahal to perform this season.

BOOKS

SOME CAN WHISTLE by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster; $19.95). Some of McMurtry's good books, like Terms of Endearment, have been turned into good movies. Alas, this novel, about a feckless millionaire TV writer discovering his daughter from a long-ago marriage, is not a good book. Wait for the inevitable screen adaptation.

A PLACE FOR US by Nicholas Gage (Houghton Mifflin; $19.95). The author scored six years ago with Eleni, the story of his mother's heroic sacrifice in smuggling her children away from Communist insurgents in Greece during the 1940s. This time, Gage focuses on his father, who had preceded his family to America to try to find a better life for them all. Instead he welcomed ashore four motherless children and earned this touching, textured memoir from one of them.

ART

VELAZQUEZ, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. If you want to know what realist painting is or can be, look at Velazquez. Artists have said so for 300 years. Here, in 38 choice canvases, is the reason why. Through Jan. 7.

TASTES

California has long had Chardonnays to match the white wines of Burgundy and Cabernets to challenge the reds of Bordeaux. Now it has a brandy that compares, worthily, with the great grape distillates of Cognac. It is Germain- Robin, named for French expatriate Hubert Germain-Robin, who has been producing it in minute quantities in Mendocino County since 1981. Lot 6, now on the market, is feather-touch brandy -- smooth, light and spicy, more akin to a Cognac by Delamain or a small producer like R. Ragnaud than to the mass- market offerings of Remy Martin and Hennessy. Next year Germain-Robin and partner Ansley Coale Jr. will start selling their first equivalent of a Cognac X.O., a satiny-textured beauty with seven years in cask. The price tag, alas, will be strictly Faubourg-St.-Honore: about $65 retail.