THE WEEK’S OTHER PRIME-TIME FILMS

Francis Coppola’s The Cotton Club (KCOP, Monday at 7:30 p.m.) jettisons authenticity in regard to the famed Harlem hot spot, yet comes up with a fairly dazzling entertainment, a sort of gangster movie musical. Richard Gere stars as an ambitious cornet player and Gregory Hines as an equally driven tap dancer. It’s fun but mighty thin. However, Bob Hoskins is a splendid Owney Madden, the club’s gangland proprietor, and so is Fred Gwynne as his avuncular sidekick.

Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 Brainstorm (KTLA, Tuesday at 8 p.m., again on Friday at 1:30 a.m.) prophesies the invention of a device that enables us to videotape our thoughts, memories, fantasies and emotions. Slip on a headset, and you’ll enter the very being of another individual-for better or worse. All this becomes amazingly persuasive only to become grounded on such mundane ills as confused plotting, thin characterizations and underdeveloped relationships. Natalie Wood, Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher, however, give it their best.

A terrifying, uncompromising portrait of rural America, Macon County Line (KTTV, Wednesday at 8 p.m.) stars Alan and Jesse Vint as a pair of happy-go-lucky Chicagoans passing through the Louisiana backwoods, only to be mistakenly arrested for murdering a sheriff’s wife.

A sophisticated attempt at a contemporary “Casablanca,” The Year of Living Dangerously (KTLA, Thursday at 8 p.m.) has Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver caught up in a romance as steamy as its exotic Indonesian locale. The time is the toppling of Sukarno.

Robert M. Young’s endearing Rich Kids (KTLA, Saturday at 6 p.m.) centers on a couple of likable adolescents (Trini Alvarado and Jeremy Levy) trying to make their own way in a world their parents have made a mess of.

In Fred Schepisi’s coolly brilliant Plenty (KTLA, Saturday at 8 p.m.), Meryl Streep, remarkable as usual, plays an Englishwoman whose finest hour, like that of her country, occurs during World War II.