Recalling his life as a 1945 Army...

Recalling his life as a 1945 Army recruit in Mississippi in the winning, bittersweet 1988 Biloxi Blues (KTLA Monday at 8 p.m.), Neil Simon has come up with some marvelous moments, and director Mike Nichols turns the sentimental story into something darker, richer, more underplayed: nostalgia with pinpricks of pain, in a mood of hard-edged reverie. With Matthew Broderick re-creating his Broadway role as Simon’s alter ego.

The 1987 Black Widow (KTTV Monday at 8 p.m.) can intrigue you with its tale of the obsessions of one young woman (Debra Winger) with the life and crimes of another (Theresa Russell), but it never really gets you by the throat.

WarGames (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is a taut, ingenious 1983 winner in which high school computer whiz Matthew Broderick blunders into a game, global thermonuclear war, with the defense department’s computer, which keeps ticking away after Broderick calls it quits.

Guilty Conscience (KTTV Tuesday at 8 p.m.), a notable 1985 TV movie written by Richard Levinson and William Link, stars Anthony Hopkins, who debates the murdering of his wife with an alter ego.

Paul Schrader’s uneven 1987 Light of Day (KTLA Wednesday at 8 p.m.), both family drama and rock vehicle, is bolstered by Gena Rowlands’ richly drawn portrait of an intensely religious dying mother deeply disapproving of the lifestyle of her aspiring rock musician children (Michael J. Fox, Joan Jett).

Tenderness, a defining intelligence and the sting of real emotion characterize Hugh Hudson’s elegant and ambitious 1984 Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (KCOP Wednesday at 8 p.m.), which juxtaposes an enthralling vision of life in the jungle with a highly ironic view of British civilization. Christopher Lambert is wholly persuasive as the Scottish aristocrat, orphaned in the jungle and raised by apes.

Far from your usual study in courage, the 1991 TV movie Without Warning: The James Brady Story (KCOP Thursday at 8 p.m.) is, of all things, a portrait of a disabled man as an obstinate, ignorant, bullying jerk; Beau Bridges won an Emmy for his portrayal of the presidential press secretary felled by a would-be assassin’s bullet in 1981.

The 1975 Escape to Witch Mountain (KTLA Saturday at 6 p.m.) is true to all the old Walt Disney specifications, yet is one of the freshest and most engaging of the studio’s live-action movies of the ‘70s. Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann are brother and sister, an odd pair who can communicate without talking and who possess other magical powers.