John Boorman’s 1990 Where the Heart Is...

John Boorman’s 1990 Where the Heart Is (KTLA Sunday at 7 p.m.) is a fairy tale about riches, poverty, art and the power of family that is to some extent split against itself. The rapturous visuals, Boorman’s specialty, clash with his own stiff screenplay--co-written with his daughter Telsch. This cautionary comedy about extraordinary reversals of fortune is constructed like the Arthurian legends of Boorman’s “Excalibur.” Superficially, it’s the tale of a demolition tycoon (Dabney Coleman) who, incensed at his children’s arty radicalism, exiles them to a Brooklyn tenement, slated for demolition but also eligible for landmark status.

The Manhattan of Terry Gilliam’s 1991 The Fisher King (NBC Sunday at 8 p.m.) is a monumentally grungy den of iniquity, a vision of New York as a medieval fortress. This all seems appropriate to the story, which is a modern variant on the search for the Holy Grail. Jeff Bridges plays Manhattan’s top shock deejay, now reduced to a disheveled, guilt-ridden obscurity; Robin Williams is a half-mad wastrel who rescues Bridges from muggers. The subtext of their friendship is that love conquers all, but it doesn’t connect with the film’s full-blown weirdness and its spasms of knockabout lunacy. With an Oscar-winning Mercedes Ruehl as Bridges’ vivid, hard-pressed lover; Amanda Plummer as a shy young woman Bridges tries to pair Williams with, and Michael Jeter in a show-stopping drag number.

Laura Dern and Diane Ladd became the first mother-daughter Oscar nominees for their performances in Martha Coolidge’s luminous 1991 Rambling Rose (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.), Calder Willingham’s adaptation of his autobiographical novel set in the 1930s South. Dern plays a sweet, sexy teen-ger who comes to work for Ladd and her husband, Robert Duvall. The consequences of her presence are not as predictable as one might guess.

The 1992 Gladiator (KTTV Tuesday at 8 p.m.), a “Rocky”-esque fantasia, offers a Great White Hope scenario that plugs into race-baiting but covers its tracks by trying for a brotherhood-of-man effect. It combines a trashy, low-road, rabble-rousing spirit with high-road pretensions. To erase some of his gambler father’s markers, a young man (James Marshall) agrees to a one-time-only--yeah, sure--prizefight.

Kenny Rogers as The Gambler III: The Legend Continues (KTLA Wednesday at 8 p.m., concludes Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a routine 1987 TV Western in which Rogers and pal Bruce Boxleitner seek justice for the Sioux during the climactic days of the Indian Wars in the Dakota Territory. In a kind of reworking of “The African Queen” as a Western, the 1975 Rooster Cogburn (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m.) teams John Wayne’s crusty U.S. marshal from “True Grit” with Katharine Hepburn; the stars are better than their material.

It wouldn’t be the holiday season without It’s a Wonderful Life, which airs on NBC Saturday at 8 p.m., the only viewing of the classic this year due to the ending of the film’s public domain status.