The 1982 film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s...

The 1982 film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (Channel 5 Sunday at 6 p.m.) plays well but lacks punch, despite Nick Nolte’s ability to get inside the kindly loner Doc, the most respected of the dropouts inhabiting Monterey’s picturesque cannery district in the ‘40s.

A Death in Canaan

(Channel 13 Sunday at 6 p.m.) is a fine and urgent 1978 TV movie about a teen-ager (Paul Clemens) accused of his mother’s murder. Adapted by the late Thomas Thompson and Spencer Eastman from Joan Barthel’s book, it was directed with understated eloquence by Tony Richardson.

The 1987 TV movie Escape From Sobibor (CBS Sunday at 8 p.m.) is that rarity, a Holocaust drama that is a success story. “Sobibor” is the account of an actual escape from a Nazi extermination camp. Alan Arkin, Joanna Pacula and Rutger Hauer star.

Drawing from personal experience, writer Bo Goldman wrote Shoot the Moon (Channel 5 Sunday at 8 p.m.), one of the best pictures of 1982 and an exceedingly painful and persuasive account of the breakup of a marriage. But director Alan Parker tackled the material with such ferocity that this film about alienation verges on alienation itself, especially as the husband (Albert Finney) rages out of control at his rejecting wife (Diane Keaton)--and the film goes along without him.

One of the most famous movies of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is back (Channel 5 Monday at 8 p.m.), and its 1986 sequel Psycho III airs on KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.

Guilty of Innocence: The Lenell Geter Story (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.) evokes outrage over the sentencing of a young black engineer (an effective Dorian Harewood) to life imprisonment for armed robbery in a clear case of mistaken identity. Unfortunately this 1987 TV movie otherwise lacks clarity and development.

In the dark, intelligent and artful 1981 Scanners (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m.), Canadian horrormeister David Cronenberg imagines that there is a small band of men and women whose ESP has developed to inhuman levels, with results truly gruesome.

Shampoo (Channel 11 Thursday at 8 p.m.), that sparkling satire of Beverly Hills life in the ‘70s, stars Warren Beatty as a hair stylist who also is a compulsive womanizer.

In Joe Dante’s The Howling (Channel 5 Friday at 8 p.m.), the horror is as grisly as it is funny. Dee Wallace stars as a newscaster who has a bad brush with a psychopath only to find that suave, soothing psychiatrist Patrick Macnee’s Northern California retreat is scarcely the place to recuperate.

The 1984 film of John le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl (Channel 13 Friday at 8 p.m.) squeezed the life out of its rich and complex material and generated only the most mechanical kind of suspense. Diane Keaton is its hapless star, cast as an actress recruited by the Israelis to snare a Palestinian terrorist.