Critics' Voices

By TIME''S REVIEWERS/Compiled by Andrea Sachs

MUSIC

DEADICATED (Arista). Mercy me, not ecology again. But -- yes -- it's a save- the-rain-forest jamboree of 15 Grateful Dead tunes covered in rambunctious fashion by artists as diverse as Jane's Addiction and Suzanne Vega. Check out Warren Zevon and David Lindley taking Casey Jones down the track and Elvis Costello keeping Ship of Fools dead on course. But there's good work all around.

LE MYSTERE DES VOIX BULGARES: VOL III (Fontana/Polygram). Voices, the name used by several women's choirs that sing traditional Bulgarian folk songs, has built a growing cult of listeners since its first U.S. release four years ago, and deservedly so. The a cappella harmonies use impossibly high pitches with exquisite precision. The effect is weird, beautiful and sometimes unearthly.

PROKOFIEV: The Complete Piano Music, Vols. 1-4 (Chandos). For Sergei Prokofiev's centennial, Boris Berman has begun a welcome traversal of all this modern master's difficult solo piano music. It's safe to say of Berman -- whose strong technique is calculated to capture both the music's lyricism and its sardonic bite -- that his artistry equals his audacity.

ART

HARRY LIEBERMAN: A JOURNEY OF REMEMBRANCE, Museum of American Folk Art, New York City. Forty-five paintings recalling the lost world of prewar European Jewry. Through Sept. 22.

GREAT AMERICAN COMICS: 100 YEARS OF CARTOON ART, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Nearly 100 original cartoon panels documenting this whimsical and sometimes serious art form, from the turn-of-the-century adventures of Little Nemo through the goings on of Opus the penguin. Through Nov. 10.

BOOKS

BRIEF LIVES by Anita Brookner (Random House; $20). A woman approaching 70 grows reminiscent after seeing an obituary of an acquaintance 10 years older. The lives portrayed in this novel -- the author's 10th -- are hardly brief, but they radiate considerable strength and poignancy.

PRESERVATION HALL by William Carter (Norton; $29.95). From its beginnings on the site of an obscure French Quarter art gallery in the early 1960s, Preservation Hall became an internationally renowned Mecca for traditional New Orleans jazz. This lavishly illustrated volume chronicles the personalities and music behind one of the most stunning, and improbable, success stories in the history of American entertainment.

TELEVISION

COVER TO COVER (NBC, debuting July 29, 11 a.m. EDT on most stations). This new magazine show targeted to women, with hosts Gayle King and Robin Wagner, will spotlight stories on such topics as fashion, health and parenting. The ones, presumably, that Oprah and Good Morning America have missed.

PAN AMERICAN GAMES (ABC, Aug. 3-18). ABC Sports, shut out of the Olympics for a good while, will try to recapture the thrill of victory with more than 20 hours of coverage of the hemispheric competition, originating from Cuba.

THE NEW RANGE WARS (PBS, Aug. 6, 9 p.m. on most stations). The usually mild- mannered National Audubon Society got into hot water with cattlemen (and the Ford Motor Co., which pulled its ads from an earlier showing on TBS) with this hourlong report on the dispute between environmentalists and ranchers over public grazing land in the American Southwest.

MOVIES

DARK OBSESSION. Gabriel Byrne (Miller's Crossing) feels guilty; Amanda Donohoe (L.A. Law) gets horny. And everyone else in this English country house does what aristocrats do best: prove they don't deserve their status. Go to Nick Broomfield's NC-17 thriller for the redeeming prurient interest and stay for the acid-etched portrait of a man with too much time and blood on his hands.

LIVIN' LARGE. Can a street kid with a nose for news become an anchorman at an all-white station? In this broad, funny fable, the answer is: guess! Senses of humor and human proportion have been lacking in recent black films, but writer William Mosley-Payne and director Michael Schultz find them both.

THE REFLECTING SKIN. The exploding toad, the embalmed fetus, the man who incinerates himself . . . Had enough? Then skip Philip Ridley's hallucinogenic melodrama about weird doin's down on the farm. But do so at the peril of missing a gorgeously bizarre chamber of horrors that taps into the everyday hell of growing up lonely.

THEATER

THE MATCHMAKER. Dorothy Loudon, the original Miss Hannigan in Annie, blends truth and charm as Dolly Levi in the premusical version of Hello, Dolly!, artfully revived off-Broadway.

MR. GOGOL AND MR. PREEN. How could Elaine May recover from the film fiasco of Ishtar? By returning to her roots in sketch comedy off-Broadway with this sweet, sentimental, intermittently delightful encounter between a lonely vacuum-cleaner salesman and his equally lonely old customer.

ARTHUR. Sans Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli but abetted by an abundant score and by amiable Broadway veterans Gregg Edelman (City of Angels) and Michael Allinson (Shadowlands) as a drunk and his butler, the comedy film turns musical at Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam.

IN LIKE HIM

THE ROCKETEER. He died more than three decades ago, but Errol Flynn is the hottest new star in pictures. Kevin Costner makes a Robin Hood movie, and critics compare it invidiously with the classic Flynn version of 1938. Then there's The Rocketeer, set in that memorable movie year. The film's zestiest character -- swashbuckler, womanizer, Nazi agent -- is a thin, engaging caricature of Hollywood's most beloved rogue (played with a lovely, menacing silliness by Timothy Dalton). The Rocketeer, based on Dave Stevens' meticulously evocative comic books, mostly meanders where it means to soar. But Old Hollywood figures such as Howard Hughes and W.C. Fields are impersonated, and such aerial antiques as the Hindenburg and Hughes' Spruce Goose airplane are invoked as icons from a past so remote it seems like tomorrow. Flynn, of course, remains the most entertaining of these artifacts. And the most marketable. Anyone for a remake of Captain Blood?