Movie Spotlight

In an auspicious network movie debut, Kathleen Turner, in Friends at Last (KCBS Sunday at 9 p.m.), almost scratches her nails into the screen in an indelible portrayal of a loving wife starkly embittered by the shock of divorce. Susan Sandler’s script for “Friends at Last,” crucially set in the post-”Feminine Mystique” ’60s and ‘70s, shines a stronger light on the nature of our divorce culture. Although this is a women’s picture, the husband (Colm Feore) is not a caricature or an easy knee-jerk target but a fairly representative, immature guy on New York’s fast track--in this case, a wholly self-absorbed, insensitive newspaper columnist who exploits his proud homemaker wife as a running character in his column “Manhattan Diary.” What sets the production apart from the sob sister genre is Turner’s fierce, heart-rending performance: a portrait of betrayal that’s harrowing but never overdone.

The rowdy, rambunctious, sweet-natured 1955 Tommy Boy (KNBC Sunday at 9 p.m.) suggested that we had a worthy successor to John Candy in massive, jowly Chris Farley, but Farley’s life and career proved to be even shorter than that of Candy or Farley’s hero, John Belushi. Farley’s Tommy Callahan has managed to graduate from Marquette and head home to join the family business run by his hearty dad, Big Tom (Brian Dennehy). Considerably less than thrilled to see him is David Spade, who is assigned the task of keeping an eye on Tommy. Spade convinces us--and Tommy himself--that Tommy’s not really as dumb as he seems.

The Color of Money (FOX Wednesday at 8 p.m.), the 1986 sequel to “The Hustler,” picks up Fast Eddie 20 years later: He’s the exploiter this time, with a new young cueball hotshot under his wing. Both the Richard Price dialogue and the Michael Ballhaus camerawork really smoke, but the pat, cynically upbeat ending is unforgivable. (Couldn’t these filmmakers see they were cheating their own material?) Until then, it’s a classy, canny, superheated movie; a pros show all around. Directed with flash and flourish by Martin Scorsese; Paul Newman and Tom Cruise strike sparks as the sharks.

In Only the Lonely (KTLA Friday at 9 p.m.) writer-director Chris Columbus gets caught in limbo between archetypal comedy and TV drama naturalism. The casting of John Candy as a bachelor Chicago cop and Maureen O’Hara, in her first film since 1971, as his domineering, opinionated mother, is really inspired. It’s not the gem it wants to be, but this 1991 release is not just a movie only a mother could love.