Critics' Choice

MUSIC

PAUL McCARTNEY: FLOWERS IN THE DIRT (Capitol). McCartney goes back to the future by returning to his old Beatles label and collaborating with a shrewd, spiky co-writer, Elvis Costello. That Day Is Done and My Brave Face show both these lads in top form, and the entire album has a buoyancy that has eluded McCartney for years.

DR. JOHN: IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD (Warner Bros.). When jazz meets up with rhythm and blues, it's usually less a shoot-out than a sellout: one or the other gets sold short. Dr. John, a surgical master at the piano and a good, gruff vocalizer, is one physician with a solid prescription to do each style right -- and proud.

ART

AGAINST NATURE: JAPANESE ART IN THE EIGHTIES, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Architect Arata Isozaki and fashion designer Issey Miyake are famous abroad, but contemporary visual art from Japan is still little known in the West. The first major U.S. museum show from Japan in more than 20 years brings American audiences up-to-date with a survey of new work from the cultural center of East Asia. Through Aug. 6.

THE DADA AND SURREALIST WORD-IMAGE, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Between 1915 and 1940, painters like Max Ernst and Paul Klee experimented by juxtaposing images with written words, permanently altering the vocabulary of visual art. This adventurous exhibition explores the relationship not only between word and image but also between language, art and psychology. Through Aug. 27.

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.

MOVIES

MAJOR LEAGUE. In a season thick with baseball flicks, David S. Ward gives us a rowdy, genial, cynical comedy about a fanciful Cleveland Indians team. Populated by rejects from the Mexican, minor and California penal leagues, this motley Tribe can't lose. The dialogue is breezy, the tone acerb and the climax as predictably uplifting as Rocky's.

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

ON THE TOWN. Washington's Arena Stage gives a fizzy revival to the whole of the classic musical, which is exuberantly excerpted in Jerome Robbins' Broadway.

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.

BOOKS