Bill Cosby mugs, winks and cavorts his...

Bill Cosby mugs, winks and cavorts his way through Ghost Dad (NBC tonight at 7), a bland 1990 release in which he plays a widower with three kids who dies in a car crash but is given three days of spectral presence in order to clinch a business deal to provide for his family.

John Frankenheimer’s 1965 The Train (KTTV Monday at 8 p.m.) is an exciting melodrama starring Burt Lancaster, who’s trying to waylay a Germany-bound train filled with art treasures belonging to France.

The Last Tycoon (KCOP Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a luminous, ambitious but only fitfully alive adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel. Elia Kazan and Harold Pinter are curious miscastings as director and writer, respectively; Kazan’s style is too overblown and Pinter’s knowledge of Hollywood is all too clearly not first-hand. Nonetheless, Robert De Niro is wonderful as the extraordinarily complex, subtle and perceptive Monroe Stahr, whom Fitzgerald based on Irving Thalberg. Also memorable: Tony Curtis as a distraught star.

Peter Weir’s 1989 Dead Poets Society (CBS Friday at 8 p.m.) is set 30 years earlier, in an East Coast prep school, which Weir turns into an evil ice palace. The film becomes an allegory on the dark side of adolescence, a romantic fable about the destruction of beauty in a conformist world. Robin Williams, playing with a fine lyric-comic frenzy, is a brilliant teacher who wants his students to gorge themselves on the dreams and words of Whitman, Shakespeare and Keats.

In Paternity (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.) Burt Reynolds plays a self-centered, inconsiderate 44-year-old man who pays $50,000 to waitress-music student Beverly D’Angelo; even though a romance develops, Reynolds’ character doesn’t change enough not leave a sour aftertaste to the film.

Movies to Tape

Spartacus (ABC tonight at 9, concluding Monday at 9 p.m.) The 1960 Stanley Kubrick blockbuster was never great and is not now in its restored version, but it is a story uncommonly well-told and exudes a great big cartoonish beauty of heroism featuring Kirk Douglas’ iron-man heroics and much prissy snarling from its famous, ringleted cast (Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton).

Def by Temptation (Cinemax Monday at 12:30 a.m.) With this smart and stylish 1990 release actor James Bond III--and now writer-director-producer--turns the old vampire-succubus horror picture inside out, discovering all sorts of unexpected possibilities for humor and meaning. Bond plays a small-town Southern youth, a divinity student, on a visit to Harlem.

The Tall Guy (TMC Monday at 9 p.m.) What keeps this 1990 film consistently amiable is the affection director Mel Smith and writer Richard Curtis have for the rowdy, posturing life of the theater. Jeff Goldblum has never been funnier as an American actor in London who wins the lead in a musical version of “The Elephant Man”--and the heart of the deliciously witty and attractive Emma Thompson.

1900 (Bravo Tuesday at 5 p.m.) Restored to its original five hours-plus running time, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 epic can be seen as a stupendous achievement and not merely a wildly ambitious film of wretched excesses. This attempt to trace the political history of Italy from the turn of the century to the end of World War II, through the lives of landowner Robert De Niro and peasant Gerald Depardieu needs every minute of its restored 90 minutes to establish a strong cultural context for all its tumult.