Naked Lunch

It's rare to find a film that features women as its main characters, and it's even more unusual to discover one that deals with the relationship between a mother and daughter. In Hollywood, mothers and daughters in recent years have been dealt with mostly in terminal-illness soap operas ("Terms of Endearment" and "Steel Magnolias") or mother-as-best-friend comedies ("Mermaids").

Burroughs is one of the anomalies of 20th-Century American letters, and so it should come as no surprise that this collection of his occasional writings of the last few decades should stand as an anomalous gathering as well. Here we have some (all too brief) elegaic recollections of his St. Louis boyhood, a group of essays on politics and drugs, on psychology, on the future, and on writers and writing.

Kathy Acker has achieved cult status in the small-press world, presumably for the graphic sexual content of her fictions and the nasty bad-girl attitude that fuels them. She is, fundamentally, an experimental minimalist. This collection consists of three mini-"novels" (two of them are fewer than 100 pages) which were previously self-published in the early and mid-'70s. And one wonders at the wisdom of bringing forth such raw and marginal early efforts.

Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan (Henry Holt: $27.50; 630 pages) Near the end of his book about writer William Burroughs, Ted Morgan tells us that "the biographer," as he refers to himself, had mixed feelings about undertaking the project. On the one hand, "the biographer wondered what kind of mess he had got himself into agreeing to write a book about a friend."

At one point in "Impromptu," James Lapine's new romantic film comedy, 19th-Century novelist George Sand offers some of her strength to Frederic Chopin. "I'll show you how to breathe," she promises the frail, introverted composer, on whom she's developed a Gargantuan crush. "Why stay inside wrestling with perfection? I may not be full of virtues, but I love strongly, exclusively, steadfastly."

Robert Sobieszek, the longtime curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who took a fledgling collection in new directions and mounted adventurous shows that expanded the boundaries of what could be considered fine art photography, died at a Los Angeles hospital Friday after a long battle with cancer. He was 62.

Turner Stokes is an energetic 61-year-old electronics engineer from Leesburg, Va., who wears a big white mustache. On weekends, that is all he wears. Stokes, former president of the American Sunbathing Assn., is one of the nation's leading nudists. "I don't even own a bathing suit," he says. Stokes, who operates the National Capital Sun Club, reveals that more and more senior citizens are doffing their bathing suits at nudist clubs and beaches around the country.

Before it became known as psychoanalysis, the radical new method of dealing with emotional crises pioneered by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and others was known simply as "the talking cure. " And it is talk - smart, satisfying and sometimes even thrilling - that is at the heart of "A Dangerous Method. " "Method" stars Viggo Mortensen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung, and a game but somewhat miscast Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a woman who influenced them both. The confident directing style of David Cronenberg is essential in making this kind of intellectually stimulating cinema look easy, but the critical component in the film's success is Christopher Hampton's classically well-written script.

Philip K. DICK, the science-fiction author who struggled for years with personal demons, never saw "Blade Runner," the first Hollywood adaptation of his writing. He died of a stroke just four months shy of its release in 1982. His grieving daughter Isa, then 15, remembers going to see the film in a San Rafael theater hoping that it might, somehow, keep part of her father alive.