Critics' Voices

By TIME''s Reviewers/Compiled by Linda Williams

MOVIES

HOOK. In this bloated fantasy, a middle-aged Peter Pan (Robin Williams) regains his youth battling a drawling Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman). Steven Spielberg's zillionth reworking of his lost-children theme is a Spruce Goose of a movie: so big, so long, so pretty . . . it just can't fly.

STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. The unseen star of this instant smash is Mikhail Gorbachev: his overtures to peace some years back inspired a parable of detente involving the Enterprise guys and the evil Klingon empire. Though William Shatner & Co. claim that this is the saga's last chapter, we'll bet they keep going until Willard Scott is wishing them all happy birthday. That would be about 1994.

MY FATHER IS COMING. A middle-aged German (Alfred Edel) visits his renegade daughter in New York City and falls in with a liberated stripper (Annie Sprinkle, the porn star and performance artist). Monika Treut's rambling comedy could use more of the city's notorious juice and danger; her Manhattan is as drab as a Third World amusement park.

TELEVISION

ENTERTAINERS '91: THE TOP 20 OF THE YEAR (ABC, Dec. 26, 8 p.m. EST). Those old rivals, the broadcast networks and cable, seem to be getting pretty cozy. This year-end special, with host Dennis Miller, has been produced for ABC by E! Entertainment Television. If you can't beat 'em . . .

THE KENNEDY CENTER HONORS (CBS, Dec. 26, 9 p.m. EST). Washington's black-tie crowd pays tribute to another passel of show-business greats. This year's honorees are Gregory Peck, Roy Acuff, Broadway and film veterans Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the dancing Nicholas Brothers and choral director Robert Shaw.

ASPEN (PBS, Dec. 30, 9 p.m. on most stations). Frederick Wiseman, the no- frills documentarian who has explored everything from hospitals to animal laboratories, gets a rare dose of fresh air in this 2 1/2-hr. look at the trendy Colorado retreat.

MUSIC

THE CHIEFTAINS: THE BELLS OF DUBLIN (RCA Victor). Is it too late for season's greetings? Not when they're as enterprising and altogether buoyant as this collection of Christmas songs by the great Irish traditional band, who augment their fiddles, harpsichord and Uilleann Pipes with vocal accompaniment by such % diverse characters as Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones and Marianne Faithfull. A real Christmas treat!

ENYA: SHEPHERD MOONS (Reprise). Gaelic music of a different sort. Enya sounds like Sinead O'Connor after an overdose of chill pills; her songs seem, at first hearing, like the ideal background for stores that sell granola and wind chimes. But hang in. Enya mixes New Age with space age and Irish mysticism, and there is supple witchery here.

STRIKE UP THE BAND (Nonesuch/Elektra). This Gershwin pseudo-operetta folded in tryouts in 1927 despite such standards as The Man I Love and the title song. Radically reconceived in 1930, it then featured I've Got a Crush on You and still funny satirical ditties. Neither book is good enough to hold the stage these days, but both scores are meticulously sung in a new recording, invaluable to musical buffs. A high spot: tap numbers that capture the clatter and swish of each individual shoe.

THEATER

PETER PAN. Critics scoffed when ex-gymnast Cathy Rigby dared to take on Mary Martin's showcase role, but she has proved herself a worthy successor -- on national tour and, for two holiday seasons, on Broadway. The special effects will never compare with Hook, but the storytelling is sweeter and more fun.

TWO SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS. London loved U.S. writer Richard Nelson's semitrue story about rival Macbeths who sparked an 1849 New York City riot. For the Broadway staging, now in previews, Brian Bedford and Victor Garber play the duo, one British and one American, one declamatory and the other psychological in style.

BOOKS

WOMEN ON TOP by Nancy Friday (Simon & Schuster; $22). In reviewing the responses to her latest questionnaire, Friday discovered that women are undergoing another sexual revolution. She notes that at the time of her 1973 tome, My Secret Garden, women fantasized about submission and about being victims of rape and other sexual offenses. Now they dream of being aggressors, and are "on top" in sexual posture and every other way.

COMPLETELY MAD by Maria Reidelbach (Little, Brown; $39.95). For almost 40 years, American adolescence has been incomplete without a case of acne or a subscription to Mad magazine. This bright chronicle explains why the latter, at least, is true. While Alfred E. ("What -- Me Worry?") Neuman has watched two generations age, the sophomoric magazine has made the best of what its creator considered "a corrupt society."

FALSE GLORY: THE STEVE COURSON STORY by Steve Courson and Lee R. Schreiber (Longmeadow Press; $19.95). The former Steelers offensive lineman teams up with a brilliant rookie biographer for an expose of the unforgiving world of professional football and the body-bulking steroids that helped Courson get to the top of the heap before side effects left him in desperate need of a heart transplant.

BELLES OF THE BLUES

Those ubiquitous CD box sets are not only a wildly successful marketing tool, they can also be a true boon to music lovers -- provided the artist is worthy of such enshrinement. Consider the recent compilations of two of the century's most formative singers. BESSIE SMITH: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS VOL. 2 (Columbia/Legacy) showcases this humongous godmamma of the blues in full cry, scorching the earth with New Gulf Coast Blues and Dixie Flyer Blues, marvelously backed by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson. BILLIE HOLIDAY: THE LEGACY (1933-1958) (Columbia) is a shrewdly chosen 70-cut package from her fecund Columbia years, bound to urge anyone with ears on to the complete -- and completely indispensable -- Columbia recordings (available on nine separate CDs). BILLIE HOLIDAY: THE COMPLETE DECCA RECORDINGS (GRP) includes 50 performances from 1944 to 1950 that push Lady Day toward pop but still keep her sensuality and edge of danger.