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Driving Miss Daisy (ABC Sunday at 9...

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Driving Miss Daisy (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.), which was brought skillfully to the screen by director Bruce Beresford and the play’s writer Alfred Uhry, gave Jessica Tandy a well-deserved Oscar. She plays a cranky Atlanta widow, who over 25 years (starting in 1948) gradually develops a tender friendship with her endlessly patient chauffeur (Morgan Freeman). The 1989 film celebrates friendship as well as comments on the civil rights movement.

House Party (KCAL Sunday at 9 p.m.) is a catchy, often hilarious 1990 teen-age sex comedy set in an all-black milieu. It has an exaggerated rhythm, loud and consciously vulgar, but director Reginald Hudlin has the breezy self-assurance to carry it along. “Party” takes place on a day and night when three high school students (Christopher Reid, Christopher Martin and Martin Lawrence) set up a bash at Martin’s place while his parents are away. Jazzy and sassy, it’s dense with hip-hop hip and corny gags.

The 1989 Licence to Kill (KTTV Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.) milks the formula as before, but its overall tone is more burnished, somber. It sends the new Bond, Timothy Dalton--a more wounded and sensitive Bond than we’ve ever seen--on a desperate, one-man vendetta against a South American cocaine czar.

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Blade Runner (KTLA Friday at 7:30 p.m.) takes place in the used-up future: Los Angeles 2019, a dense and ominous metropolis. Director Ridley Scott has made a sensational-looking film that combines film noir and sci-fi to probe a highly dangerous world in which it’s hard to tell who’s human and who’s a replicant. Bounty hunter Harrison Ford can tell the difference. As great as it looks, this 1982 film seems pretty hollow--at least in this standard-release version, not the much-heralded restored director’s cut, unavailable to KTLA.

John Sayles’ hilarious 1984 The Brother From Another Planet (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.) is a true cosmic joke, a sly fable about a black slave (Joe Morton) from outer space who lands in the most ironic promised land of them all--Harlem--and who has the power of healing.

In the magical 1989 Sidewalk Stories (KCET Saturday at 10:45 p.m.) filmmaker Charles Lane had the audacity to make a black-and-white silent with a brimming heart and an activist’s outraged passion. Lane casts himself as the Chaplinesque hero, a bashful, ingenious Greenwich Village street portraitist who unexpectedly finds himself in charge of an adorable 2-year-old.

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