Once you brush past the dreary domestic...

Once you brush past the dreary domestic scenes that set up the plot’s flash point, the 1993 TV movie A Family of Strangers (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.) turns into an absorbing adoption mystery. Melissa Gilbert stars as a young woman who needs to trace her family history in order to have life-saving brain surgery.

Deadly Intentions ... Again? (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.), a routinely made yet odd 1991 TV movie, stars Harry Hamlin as a man fresh out of prison for having plotted the murder of his wife. Hamlin’s character objects to a book and the miniseries about him and starts having murderous thoughts all over again.

Tony Scott’s 1990 Revenge (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.) is about how a Navy pilot (Kevin Costner) falls desperately in love with the wife (Madeleine Stowe) of a Mexican millionaire overlord (Anthony Quinn); what might have been a galvanizing pulp thriller bogs down in melodramatic murk.

Taken from a real-life Vietnam War incident, Brian De Palma’s superb 1989 Casualties of War (KCOP Saturday at 6 p.m.) turns into a battle epic with a screw loose, conveying a sense of moral quagmire, all hell exploding around it. Michael J. Fox, never better, is the Minnesota farm boy who resists a gang rape planned by a macho sergeant (Sean Penn, who bursts the bounds of his role with a gargoyle intensity).

Bullitt (KCOP Saturday at 8 p.m.), a taut 1968 action film, stars Steve McQueen as a San Francisco police detective assigned to guard a criminal witness.

KCET presents on Saturday night two of director George Sidney’s best musicals: the evergreen Kiss Me Kate (at 9 p.m.), featuring Cole Porter tunes and Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson as a battling but loving couple whose stormy personal lives parallel their roles in a musical version of “The Taming of the Shrew”; and Anchors Aweigh (KCET Saturday at 10:50 p.m.), a lively tale of two sailors (Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra), highlighted by Kelly’s famous dance with the cartoons Tom and Jerry.