Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn play married...

Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn play married writers struggling through love and deals in director Norman Jewison’s 1982 Best Friends (ABC tonight at 9), which scenarists Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin took--not thoroughly enough--from real life.

In Special Effects (Channel 13 Monday at 8 p.m.) star Eric Bogosian (“Talk Radio”) and director Larry Cohen (“It’s Alive”) join forces for a tale of a director trying to make a reflexive film about the woman he’s murdered: bloody schlock by two disturbingly free spirits.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (Channel 11 Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is disturbingly free-spirited, too: a science fiction cult gag-o-rama with zanily diverse super-heroes battling a zanier villain (John Lithgow, far over the top). Earl Mac Rauch’s script is a weirdo gem, W.D. Richter’s direction a little flat.

Horrormaster Wes Craven (“Nightmare on Elm Street”) is in an unexpectedly sentimental mood in Deadly Friend (Channel 13 Tuesday at 8 p.m.), the story of a heartsick young man who revives his lost love from the dead, with understandably horrific consequences.

The fact-based Miracle Landing (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.) plays like the straight version of “Airplane!” with co-pilots Wayne Rogers and Connie Selleca and director Dick Lowry trying to steer a plane with a ripped fuselage to happy landings.

In The Cannonball Run (Channel 11 Wednesday at 8 p.m.), star Burt Reynolds and director Hal Needham give wretched excess a new meaning: an all-star super-blooper about an outlaw cross-country car-chase, with a story told better in both “Gumball Rally” and the 1976 “Cannonball” and a cast that seems to have been assembled for a Las Vegas telethon.

Chuck Norris battles a Frankenstein monster in Silent Rage (Channel 13 Friday at 8 p.m.), another slice of chop-socky mayhem that has too much rage and too little silence. It’s not the finest hour of director Michael (“Jackson County Jail”) Miller.

Triple Play II (Channel 15 Friday at 9 p.m., Channel 28 at 9:30), from “American Playhouse,” is a showcase program of three short films by young American writers-directors, financed by the Discovery Project. Tonight’s bill of fare includes Jonathan Sanger’s “Peacemaker,” Susan Rogers’ “Astronomy” and Stephen Tolkin’s “The Price of Life.”

Director Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me (CBS Saturday at 8 p.m.), about a working-class Brooklyn cop (Tom Berenger) falling for the high society Manhattan beauty (Mimi Rogers) he’s been assigned to guard, isn’t an exhilarating pop classic like Scott’s new “Thelma & Louise.” But it shows some of the same offbeat romanticism and gorgeous visual style.

Grand Illusion (Channel 28 Saturday at 9 p.m.) is Jean Renoir’s great 1937 drama of WW1 POWs and escape, with Jean Gabin, Erich von Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay. It is, by common consent, one of the finest anti-war films.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s lively comic-romantic epic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Channel 28 Saturday 10:50 p.m.), about the mythical British military figure from David Low’s cartoon, follows stiff upper lips from the Boer War through World War II, with a cast that includes staunch Roger Livesey, suave Anton Walbrook and bewitching young Deborah Kerr.