Movie Spotlight

Like men of a certain age who persist in wearing tiny ponytails, GoldenEye (KNBC Sunday at 8 p.m.), the 17th James Bond film, is a middle-aged entity anxious to appear trendy at all costs. A mildly successful attempt at updating a relic, its appeal depends greatly on an audience’s willingness to go along for a familiar ride. The 1995 GoldenEye takes place mostly in the new Russia, where Janus, a potent crime syndicate and major player among the world’s arms dealers, has managed to get its hands on a top-secret helicopter and activate “GoldenEye,” a terrifying weapon based in outer space. Bond (Pierce Brosnan, who has the right kind of swagger for OO7) is called into action once again.

In 1969 Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (KABC Monday at 9 p.m.) transcended the biker genre with the extraordinary perspective it brought to its depiction of a couple of hippie types (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) on a collision course with reactionary America. Dominating is Jack Nicholson’s alcoholic lawyer, the part that made him a star, who goes along on the ride.

Picture Sally Field, who plays a well-off woman whose daughter is raped and murdered, as Charles Bronson and you have about half of what Eye for an Eye (KCBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.) is about: the vicarious thrill of watching jerry-built justice meted out to a more-than-deserving lowlife, while we sit agitated but safe in the warm embrace of our movie seat. What makes this 1996 film more than mere visual vigilantism is John Schlesinger, who shows flashes of the old brilliance here--the talent that made “Midnight Cowboy” so moving and “Marathon Man” such a nail-biter--in telling this modern horror tale of the court system gone awry. Unfortunately, it’s a film that pits the haves against the have-nots without the slightest trace of irony or insight.

The 1990 Flatliners (KCOP Saturday at 7 p.m.) is aflame with Jan de Bont cinematography, deep-focus decor, an attractive cast, but it isn’t any deeper, dramatically or psychologically, than its own swanky trailer. In a medical school, five students try to experience life after death scientifically. Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon star.

KCET offers a terrific Saturday night double feature with Sweet Charity (at 8:30 p.m.), starring Shirley MacLaine in the 1969 musical version of Fellini’s recently revived “Nights of Cabiria,” and John Schlesinger’s 1962 Billy Liar (at 11 p.m.), a vigorous example of ous British film making in the 1960s. It’s about an ambitious young man caught in a routine existence who escapes into a rich fantasy world. Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie star.