Crackling with action, grandiose sets and childlike...

Crackling with action, grandiose sets and childlike fervor and abandon, the 1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.) is the best of the Jones trilogy. As Indiana as a boy and and as Jones’ father, the late River Phoenix and Sean Connery, respectively, provide appealing bookends for hero Harrison Ford.

The whimsical, poignant 1985 Back to the Future (KTLA Monday at 7:30 p.m.) finds small-town youth Michael J. Fox accidentally sent back 30 years so that he and wizardly Christopher Lloyd can change future history.

Can stratospheric high finance really be this much of a hoot? You can’t imagine a more deliciously entertaining movie about the $25-million leveraged buyout of the corporate giant R.J.R. Nabisco than HBO’s Emmy-winning Barbarians at the Gate (Fox Monday a 8 p.m.), which is TV’s first fact-based docu-comedy. James Garner and Jonathan Pryce star.

In the excellent, intimate 1992 The Quarrel (KCET Monday at 9 p.m.), passion and principle collide memorably as two old friends and enemies (Saul Rubinek, R.H. Thomson), Holocaust survivors both, meet unexpectedly in a Montreal park on Rosh Hashanah. Complications are large, for like the Jewish culture it tries to encapsulate in 88 minutes, this film balances philosophical issues with the warmer, earthier bonds of life.

The 1990 Jacob’s Ladder (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m., Friday at 3 a.m.) stars Tim Robbins as a Vietnam vet experiencing dreadful, recurring hallucinations, and since it’s shot almost entirely from his point of view, you never know what’s real and what isn’t. This multilayered weirdness works on a basic horror-film level, but it’s without psychological resonance.

In many ways the 1991 cable movie Conagher (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 a.m.) is the most authentic adaptation of a Louis L’Amour Western novel, seamlessly weaving together the disparate stories of two mythic figures, a lonely widow (Katharine Ross) tilling a desolate patch of land, and a tough, taciturn yet sensitive cowhand (Sam Elliott).

Saturday night specials: The Compleat Beatles (KTLA Saturday at 6 p.m.), an engrossing, music-filled documentary that lives up to its title; And Now for Something Completely Different (KCET Saturday at 11:45 p.m.), the 1972 first Monty Python movie, a collection of the choicest sketches and animated shorts from their British TV show.