The ace in the hole of Peter...

The ace in the hole of Peter Weir’s effortlessly engaging 1990 love story Green Card (KTLA Monday at 8 p.m.) is Gerard Depardieu. He’s a soulful sometime composer whose need of a green card brings him into the home and then the heart of a skittish, beautiful Andie MacDowell, who needs a spouse to hold on to her cherished Upper East Side Manhattan apartment.

Miami Blues (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.), George Armitage’s violent, dippy 1990 joy ride, derived from Charles Willeford’s smart, nasty 1984 crime novel, stars Alec Baldwin as a jailbird posing as a lawman in sun-drenched modern Miami. Fred Ward plays the cop whose credentials Baldwin purloins. It’s made with great finesse, but the results are slightly queasy.

The 1993 Rising Sun (Fox Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is the murkiest, most unsatisfying of thrillers. Based on Michael Crichton’s story of how the investigation of an L.A. murder exposes a secret Japanese determination to infiltrate and subvert the most potent of American institutions. The problem is that “Rising Sun” is no thriller but a thinly disguised political tract, with a puny plot that wastes the always capable Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, who are investigating the murder of a blonde in the headquarters of a fiercely competitive Japanese conglomerate.

Based on Manuel Puig’s novel, the 1985 Kiss of the Spider Woman (KCOP Saturday at 8 p.m.), directed by Hector Babenco, movingly juxtaposes sexual repression and political tyranny, with (Oscar-winner) William Hurt and Raul Julia, two cellmates, ripping it up in classic chamber-drama style.

With their third feature, the 1990 Miller’s Crossing (KLTA Saturday at 11:30 p.m.), Joel and Ethan Coen have turned to the period gangster picture. Gabriel Byrne and Albert Finney star in a plot that seems loosely based on bits of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Glass Key” and “Red Harvest.” The dialogue is a stylized lingo salty with profanity, sticky with innuendo and tinged with a poetic Irish lilt. The result is a modern gangster classic, atmospheric and morally ambiguous.