Claire Danes

"My So-Called Life" is about a teen-ager, but it's the quality adult drama of the TV year.It's also one of the finest family dramas in many years and the best girls' coming-of-age show the medium has ever done.The pilot, which airs at 8 tonight on WJZ (Channel 13), jump-starts the new fall season with a flash of class. It's a show that you don't want to miss.Angela Chase (Claire Danes) is the 15-year-old character at the center of the series. We see the world through her eyes, and she shares her thoughts through voice-overs.

I have now seen the pilot for "Felicity" four times. The first two times were just for enjoyment. The last two were reality checks to see if it is really as good as it seemed during the first two viewings.It is."Felicity" is the story of Felicity Elizabeth Porter, 17-year-old freshman at the University of New York. The story opens in her dorm room. She's alone and talking into a recorder, taping a letter for her friend and former French tutor, Sally, who now lives in New Mexico.In voiceover and flashback, we hear the story of a boy who wrote something in Felicity's high school yearbook a few months ago on graduation day and how she bolted from the pre-med path at Stanford that her parents had made it oh-so-easy to follow and instead came 3,000 miles to be at the same school as that boy."

On paper, it looked as if she were going to be just another TV mom in another family drama -- or worse. In this series, the teen-age daughter is the star, which usually means mom is further reduced to standing around off-camera in the kitchen, only occasionally popping on-screen to ask if anyone wants pizza or a glass of Coke.But that's not the Patty Chase that Baltimore's Bess Armstrong brought to the screen when the critically acclaimed ABC drama "My So-Called Life" debuted last month.Her 15-year-old daughter, Angela, dyed her hair red, so Patty went out and got her own hair cut very, very short.

"Little Women" gets a lot of credit for what it promises -- a new world for women -- but not enough for what it offers: Splendidly constructed 19th-century melodrama.Fortunately, its promise and its artistry are on display in the Gilliam Armstrong version of the Louisa May Alcott autobiographical classic, which opens tomorrow with Winona Ryder as Jo March. It's a terrific movie, for men and women, big and small.The novel is so beloved to American women that most have their own private Jo March, who just happens to look (fancy that!

Here's Hollywood clout: After the media became bored with the story of Polly Klaas, the young girl who was kidnapped from her home in Petaluma, Calif., Winona Ryder stepped up and kept the story alive in the national consciousness by offering a reward for the safe return of a little girl who, 15 years earlier in that same town, might have been her.Klaas was eventually discovered to have been murdered. "Little Women," which opened yesterday, is dedicated to her memory."I thought it was an appropriate dedication because it was her favorite book and I was offered the movie the day after she was kidnapped," Ms. Ryder recalls.

What's worse than going to hell in a handbasket? According to Jodie Foster, it's going to Baltimore at Thanksgiving.That's the theme of her new picture, "Home for the Holidays," which is like any family gathering on the fourth November Thursday, tense, hot, close, unpleasant, mean-spirited and harder on feelings than it is on turkeys.In fact, the turkey has it the easiest: It just lies there and gets cut to pieces. The cast members have to act as they get cut to pieces.The movie chronicles the winding-down-toward-total-dysfunction undoings of the Larson clan, nestled in a little house near Memorial Stadium, though it could be Riverfront, Dyche or Cleveland Municipal for all the local color.

It would be so pleasant to report that once upon a time, Jodie Foster had an absolutely hellish Thanksgiving and has ever since harbored a grudge against turkey day. Then it would follow that her new filmed-in-Baltimore movie, "Home for the Holidays," was an auteur's revenge, charged with meaning.She decided to do to the holiday what the holiday had done to her: slice it to pieces.And that, in turn, would turn Thursday night's gala premiere of the film at the Senator theater (Foster will attend)

Here's a guide to the best and worst shows and those worth noting -- to help you through the clutter of the new network season.Best new show: "My So-Called Life," Thursday nights at 8 on ABC. ABC wanted to make sure it got sampled before the crush of new series, so it's already debuted. It's about a 15-year-old girl (Claire Danes) coming of age. But it's also a drama about her fortysomething parents and their middle-age angst. The drama is produced by the angst-meisters of all angst-meisters, who gave us "thirtysomething" -- Ed Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz and Winnie Holzman.

After she'd had a brief incandescent run in the theater and done some TV movies, Meryl Streep got her first film role: two brief scenes in Julia, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. Her second was The Deer Hunter, in which she played a war bride and fresh-faced beauty - so green, in fact, that some thought they had merely found a woman who resembled the character and cast her. The film generated the first of her 14 Oscar nominations. Now 30 years later, Streep's oldest daughter, Mamie Gummer, after only two professional plays, has her first role of consequence in a film starring Vanessa Redgrave (Evening)

All things by immortal power near or far to each other hiddenly linked are. That thou cans't not stir a flower without troubling a star. That's what 19th-century British poet Francis Thompson wrote in verses that could have been the epigraph to Stardust, Matthew Vaughn's entertaining and sometimes enthralling adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Victorian fantasy about a troubled star. Stardust (Paramount) Starring Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro. Directed by Matthew Vaughn.