Under Sidney Lumet’s compelling direction, Jane Fonda,...

Under Sidney Lumet’s compelling direction, Jane Fonda, Raul Julia and Jeff Bridges are brilliant, but the 1986 The Morning After (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.) is less so, a thriller with a decent sensibility but no real surprises or depth. Fonda plays a faded, alcoholic, over-the-hill starlet who awakes to find a dead stranger in her bed. Julia plays her estranged, detached ex-husband, and Bridges is a stranger who enters her life and sticks to her like a burr.

The Case of the Hillside Stranglers (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.) is a new TV movie about Los Angeles serial killers Angelo Buono (Dennis Farina) and Kenneth Bianchi (Billy Zane) with Richard Crenna starring as homicide detective Bob Grogan.

Beverly Hills Cop (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.) is the 1984 Eddie Murphy smash hit, a slick, sleek (and violent) high-style Hollywood entertainment that seduces you in spite of yourself. Murphy plays a sassy, streetwise Detroit cop set down in the lush hills of Beverly.

Pretty in Pink (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.), John Hughes’ affecting 1986 variation on “Romeo and Juliet,” finds pretty but poor Molly Ringwald smitten with upper-crust preppie Andrew McCarthy. The story line creaks to a somewhat unconvincing conclusion, but the film satisfies anyway because it lets us watch kids through their own eyes.

Norma Rae (Channel 5 Tuesday at 8 p.m.), that rousing yet judicious 1979 movie dealing with labor organizing in the South, brought Sally Field her first Oscar as a rural textile worker whose consciousness is raised by New York labor organizer Ron Leibman. Beau Bridges is splendid as the new man in Field’s life. Directed by Martin Ritt and written by his old friends Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.

With Rocky IV (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.), Sylvester Stallone slid into the abyss. This bloated, preposterous foolishness has the simple Stallion pitted against a hypertechnological creation of the devious Soviets--a flat-topped, monosyllabic giant of a boxer (Dolph Lundgren), but of course you already know who’s going to win.

Buried inside the 1986 movie of Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical play Brighton Beach Memoirs (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) is a tender, sharp-eyed reminiscence of Brooklyn adolescence, but its heart seems to be beating inside a plastic wrapper. Everything is bigger, brighter and broader than it should be. Jonathan Silverman is the precocious 15-year-old hero, and Blythe Danner, lovely and accomplished actress that she is, is miscast as his lower-middle-class Jewish mother.

The 1981 Only When I Laugh (Channel 5 Thursday at 8 p.m.) is one of the best films of one of Neil Simon’s best plays, “The Gingerbread Lady,” even though it considerably reworks its source. At times the repartee ping pongs relentlessly, but it does give way to people we care about. Marsha Mason stars as a freshly dried out Broadway actress and Kristy McNichol is her teen-age daughter. The late Joan Hackett had one of her richest roles as Mason’s lacquered friend, hating turning 40, the late James Coco is Mason’s roly-poly gay actor pal, and David Dukes is Mason’s younger ex-lover, who has a surprise in store for her.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Mom (ABC Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a pleasing Disney TV movie in which suburban housewife Dyan Cannon with teen-age kids becomes a pop music star.

Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (Channel 13 Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a stunning, stylish detective mystery in the classic Raymond Chandler-Ross MacDonald mold. The investigation of a murder by a tough yet vulnerable private eye (Gene Hackman) becomes a quest for his own identity and a pursuit for truth that cuts through many layers of social strata. (Melanie Griffith made a notable movie debut in this 1975 production.)

Directed by Herbert Ross and written by Dennis Potter, Pennies From Heaven (Channel 5 Friday at 8 p.m.) is the musical as an art film, a dazzling work of fantasy so stylized and sophisticated as to be experimental. Steve Martin lip-syncs his way through Depression-era standards as a breezy Chicago sheet music salesman.

That Obscure Object of Desire and Mexican Bus Ride, two splendid Bunuels, screen on Channel 28 Saturday at 9 and 10:40 p.m., respectively, and Easy Rider airs on Channel 13 Saturday at 10 p.m.