In the hands of director Danny DeVito...

In the hands of director Danny DeVito and writer Michael Leeson, The War of the Roses (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.), the 1989 story of Oliver (Michael Douglas) and Barbara (Kathleen Turner) Rose, is biting and vicious, a styptic pencil on the battered face of “civilized divorce.”

In the overly sentimental 1993 Benny & Joon (NBC Tuesday at 9 p.m.), a small-town mechanic named Benny (Aidan Quinn) is dedicated to caring for his mentally ill sister Joon (Mary Stuart Masterston). In a card game, Joon wins Sam (Johnny Depp), a kindly eccentric who acts like a silent-screen comic.

Batman Returns (NBC Wednesday at 9 p.m.) is, for better and worse, very much the product of director Tim Burton’s morose imagination. His dark, melancholy vision is undeniably something to see, but it is a claustrophobic conception, not an expansive one, oppressive rather than exhilarating, and it strangles almost all the enjoyment out of this 1992 movie without half trying.

What keeps things interesting in the nervous, shallow 1990 cop thriller Internal Affairs (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) are its two leads: Richard Gere, as a sexy bad cop, and Andy Garcia as an internal affairs investigator so obsessed with Gere he begins to take on his personality. Despite missed opportunities, “Internal Affairs” reestablished Gere at the box office, and also gave William Baldwin exposure as a misguided partner to Gere’s villainy.

In Country (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.) is small-town Americana haunted by the Vietnam War--as a high school graduate (Emily Lloyd) gradually comes to terms with the tragedy that robbed her of a father. Director Norman Jewison’s soft, silky craftsmanship, the generous sensibility and intentions of the story, and a fine cast, headed by Bruce Willis as Lloyd’s uncle, make more of this uneven 1989 movie than it perhaps deserves.

Cry, the Beloved Country (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.), Zoltan Korda’s landmark 1951 film of the Alan Paton novel, stars Canada Lee as a rural black South African minister whose search for his son in Johannesburg involves him with a rich, bigoted white landowner.