Don’t call it a comeback. Britney Spears dusts herself off and puts on some glasses (prop?) to play an amorous receptionist on How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 8:30 p.m.). Sadly, between her custody battles, mental breakdowns, and her ill-chosen affair with a paparazzo, the cameo amounts to the only good press the fallen pop star has received in some time. (With that kind of drama, it’s clear why she—and her people—chose for her to be on a sitcom.) Her appearance will likely boost the show’s already strong ratings—it had its second-strongest numbers ever last week for its first new episode after the strike-induced hiatus—introducing the show to a larger swath of America and perhaps finally making it a legitimate inheritor of the Friends mantle.

Oh, yeah, and there’s this war going on. Thanks for reminding us, PBS! Frontline presents Bush’s War (9 p.m.), a five-hour program, broken up into two nights (the conclusion is Tuesday night, same time), recounting the history of the Iraq War. Now there’s a Britney Spears palate cleanser for you!

Meanwhile, Donnie Wahlberg hosts a special episode of Intervention (A&E, 9 p.m.) which focuses on heroin addiction in Boston suburbs. It’s a two-part series. Next week they address Dunkin’ Donuts.

TUESDAY

Autism sucks. So do most musicals. Put them together, however, and apparently you have one damn good documentary. Autism: The Musical (HBO, 8 p.m.) follows six children with the disorder as they prepare for a musical production. Kleenex not included.

’Til Death (Fox, 9:30 p.m.), the marriage sitcom starring Brad Garrett and Eddie Kaye Thomas (not together, unfortunately), returns tonight following American Idol (Fox, 8 p.m.). Garrett was really funny on Everybody Over 65 Loves Raymond. Yeah …

Dancing With the Stars has been on for about a week now, so the producers have decided to offer a recap (ABC, 8 p.m.). Jeez, talk about an insult to their audience’s intelligence. Oh, right, they watch Dancing With the Stars.

WEDNESDAY

Perhaps it was the editing, but wasn’t chef Wylie Dufresne incredibly quick and, well, oral with his opinions on last week’s episode of Top Chef (BRAVO, 10 p.m.)? Now if only he could work on the name of his restaurant. WD-50—which sounds like the latest edition of that stuff you spray into your doorknob—doesn’t exactly get the salivary glands working.

Kimberley Locke’s on Idol (Fox, 9 p.m.). Who’s Kimberley Locke? She’s the one who came in third place behind Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard in the 2003 incarnation of the show. Oh, right … Nope, still nothing.

Bonus: Remember the dude from the Oscars who was holding that weird puppet when he accepted his award. He won for best animated short. Perhaps after seeing it, Peter and the Wolf (PBS, 8 p.m.), his behavior will make more sense. But that probably won’t make him seem any less crazy.

THURSDAY

Lost (ABC, 9 p.m.) is a repeat. Luckily, two captivating reality series host their finales tonight: The Celebrity Apprentice (NBC, 9 p.m.) and Randy Jackson Presents: American’s Best Dance Crew (MTV, 10 p.m.). And by lucky, I mean totally disinterested with the opportunity to squeeze in some much neglected reading.

I kid!

That’s because there’s some thrilling NCAA tournament action on CBS (7 p.m.). This is a kind of reality television from before Survivor where people play basketball against each other and teams get eliminated!

FRIDAY

I keep meaning to watch Amnesia (NBC, 8 p.m.). But I keep forgetting. (Thanks, folks. I’m here all week.)

Of note, the season finales of In Treatment (HBO, 9 p.m.) and Free Radio (VH1, 9:30 p.m.) are tonight. Ray Romano stars on one. Can you guess which?

SUNDAY

Showtime debuts Tracey Ullman’s new show Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union (10 p.m.). The show reportedly promises day-in-the-life of sketches about David Beckham, Rita Cosby, Tony “Paulie Walnuts” Sirico, and Arianna Huffington. Now there’s a cast of the Surreal Life I’d consider watching …

The first half-hour of the film is devoted to a witless caper plot distantly derived from an old Edward G. Robinson programmer, Larceny, Inc. (1942), in which Robinson gets more laughs from a luggage shop used as a front for a tunneling expedition into an adjoining bank vault than Mr. Allen squeezes out of a pizza shop converted into a cookie shop for the same purpose. The big joke in the Depression-era movie was how tough guy Robinson discouraged the occasional customer from hanging around the premises, whereas the big joke in Small Time Crooks is the unexpected success of the cookie-shop front, to the point that it becomes a Fortune 500 gold mine for Ray and Frenchy.

The real trouble starts, literally and figuratively, when Frenchy starts putting on airs and Ray wants to stay a mug and settle down in Miami. Unfortunately, the level of satire Mr. Allen attains in his treatment of the culture vultures and society swells eagerly pursued by Frenchy would have seemed a bit broad for the old Bowery Boys. Besides, Mr. Allen was never as much a character actor as a shrewd peddler of his offscreen persona as Manhattan's most famous analysand, Knicks fan, practicing jazzman, witty autodidact, professed admirer of Mozart's music and Bergman's films and ostentatious recluse with a strategically placed table reserved at Elaine's.

His take, therefore, on the vast mass of mankind is, at the very least, uncertain, if not unpleasantly condescending. It would be a mistake to call his characters cartoonish or comic-strippy. The cartoons and comic strips I see and read these days are much more sharply etched and verbally articulated. And I am not talking about the showcases like Dilbert and Doonesbury ; just about every comic strip on the market couldn't get away with the flat and obvious dialogue in Small Time Crooks . For the first time ever, I have gotten the feeling that Mr. Allen is hopelessly out of date and out of touch with everything that is going on around him.

But one could forgive his period quaintness if there was any sign of feeling in his characters. Up to now, high-priced performers have been happy to work for a pittance if it meant appearing in a picture made by a "genius," a term Mr. Allen ridicules other people for overusing, but one he overuses himself. His big casting coup-moneywise-in Small Time Crooks is the currently hot Hugh Grant. If too many people see the movie, however, Mr. Grant's career could cool considerably. The petty, petulant, faux-Pygmalion art dealer, David, played by Mr. Grant, is one of the sleaziest and most unsympathetic characters Mr. Allen has ever created.

As for Tracey Ullman's Galatea, she is too one-dimensionally boorish to even evoke pathos. Indeed, this overgimmicky performer makes us more fully appreciate the genuine genius of Judy Holliday in similar roles. But Holliday had heart, and Ms. Ullman only has schtick. Mr. Allen's use of Elaine May as an afterthought kind of character is the only interesting element of the film. Mr. Allen doesn't seem to know what to do with a talent equal to his in wit and sharpness, though his perceptive admiration of her brilliance seems to be reflected in his wary reactions to her in their scenes together. Yet, as a character, she simply peters out in the end for the sake of a truly tedious reconciliation between Ray and Frenchy, mired forever in their mutual mediocrity.

Graceful Sister Act: Offed One by One

Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides , from her screenplay based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, unexpectedly turns out to be a subtler and more supple piece of cinema than most reviewers have indicated. I say unexpectedly because I had been led to believe the film was a gauzy, wispy, ghostly and largely unexplained treatment of a morbid fiction. Instead, I found lurking just beneath the surface of a family tragedy, a powerful undercurrent of upscale snobbery and exclusionary cruelty in the community at large. Ms. Coppola doesn't wave any flags either for feminism or for misunderstood adolescence. She actually ridicules all the do-gooders of church, state and the media, with their pat answers to all of life's baffling pathologies. Still, she doesn't supply answers of her own, or rather, she doesn't underline the answers that are staring us in the face on the screen.

The normal first reaction to a story about five teenage sisters who kill themselves one by one is to blame the parents for their misadventures. And the parents here, played by James Woods and a matriarchally padded Kathleen Turner, are each weird enough in manner and behavior to justify the most censorious diagnosis of dysfunction. Mr. Lisbon teaches math at the high school and is a virtual cipher at home, under the dominance of sexually repressed and religiously fanatical Mrs. Lisbon. Eventually, the mother explodes and her children seem to pay the price, while the father goes completely mad.

I haven't read the novel, but I tend to accept the author's quasi complaint that the movie has transformed what was in the book-a male fantasy about the haunting mystery of young womanhood buried with the five Lisbon sisters-into a spectacle of five vaguely victimized females who nonetheless dominate the screen until their collective demise. Mr. Eugenides attributes much of the change in emphasis and focus to the sheer materiality on the screen of Kirsten Dunst as Lux, Hanna Hall as Cecilia, Chelse Swain as Bonnie, A. J. Cook as Mary and Leslie Hayman as Therese. The power of the males in the novel to idealize and thereby immortalize the five Lisbon sisters is thus shared with the audience through the magic of the camera.

But what Ms. Coppola's film establishes, as much by elision and indirection as by direct statement, is that the five suicides were motivated by a collective realization that there was no future for the five in a ruthless system of caste and class.

Schoolgirls Seeking Ecstasy and Orgasms

Colette Burson's Coming Soon , from a screenplay by Ms. Burson and Kate Robin, plays out as a delightfully subversive contemplation of the quest for the female orgasm before a backdrop of Ivy League college admissions anxiety. The setting is the posh Halton School in Manhattan. How posh is the fictitious Halton? Its girls and boys can speak derisively of their counterparts at the real-life Brearley School.

The story centers on three upscale would-be cutting-edge girlfriends who trade war stories about their sexual encounters with the boys in school. Stream Hodsell (Bonnie Root) is the one who finally finds her orgasm in, of all places, a true-love romance with an initially off-putting neurotic rich boy, who has quixotically changed his name from Henry Rockefeller to Henry Lipschitz.

I know this all sounds unbearably coy, but Ms. Root, who reminds me of the deliciously cool and scruffy French actress, Sandrine Kiberlain, holds the film together with the charming perplexity of a girl just pretty enough to call the tune with her suitors, but not narcissistic enough to believe that she is some sort of princess. As a child of divorced parents, like many of her classmates, she doesn't lose much sleep at night worrying about her father (cunningly named Dick, and played by a well-preserved Ryan O'Neal) and his dalliance with a bimbo.

Indeed, Stream has enough to worry about with her ditsy mother, Judy (played by a manically mellowed Mia Farrow), and her romance with a lazy-lidded potter named Bartholemew (played by Peter Bogdanovich with an admirably accomplished insouciance). When Mr. Bogdanovich rolls his eyes at the mere mention of Barbra Streisand, a nouvelle vague "inside joke" is briskly executed at the altar of Mr. Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? (1972), which starred Mr. O'Neal and Ms. Streisand.

Fortunately, the outside jokes are even funnier than the inside variety, thanks to such gifted farceurs as Spalding Gray, as a self-promoting college admissions counselor, and Gaby Hoffman, as Jenny Simon, Stream's wisecracking but disastrously overweight confidante. Rounding out the teenage troika is Tricia Vessey, who plays Nell Kellner, the best looking, (with a magazine cover to prove it,) but also the most vulnerable, as indicated by a grotesque Prozac overdose attempt.

Ultimately, the picture belongs to Ms. Root's Stream, who goes through an Ecstasy bout with a self-absorbed slimebag of a lover named Chad (James Roday), endowed with a full assortment of the best designer drugs money can buy, before she finds real ecstasy in the arms of Henry Rockefeller (Lipschitz), who even has his own rock band.

Aside from the conventional pattern of the romantic progression, the film is so shockingly casual about Stream's experimental escapades that the whole project was reportedly rejected by several studios, and threatened with a commercially ruinous NC-17 rating on two occasions. In fact, Coming Soon , with its orgasmic double-entendre locked into the title, is closer to being a French film than a cautionary and sanitized Hollywood approach to the subject. Ms. Burson's view of sex is cheeky, but never gross, and kids may have trouble appreciating the epiphany of Stream's final close-up during her climactic sexual fulfillment.

Sure, there are some funny ideas banging around in this comedy, but they come and go like unidentified alien spaceships. A sighting here, a signal there, then off the screen into the wild blue yonder, never to be seen again. A first-rate cast that includes Woody himself, human chameleon Tracey Ullman, Elaine May, Hugh Grant, Elaine Stritch and George Grizzard manages to keep the interest focused, but not for long. The film is so episodic and meandering that concentration soon proves impossible and the mind begins to wander. Small Time Crooks makes golden retrievers of us all.

While the soundtrack plays an old Hal Kemp recording of "With Plenty of Money and You," Woody, looking like an aging dachshund with long hair that's just been rubbed the wrong way, quickly establishes himself as a bumbling crook named Ray, a dishwasher who has just served two years in the stir for a bungled robbery. ("It wasn't my fault-we were all wearing Ronald Reagan masks and I didn't know who was who.") Ray decides to make a comeback by drilling a tunnel through the floor of an abandoned shop into the bank vault next door. All he needs is to talk his peroxided, gum-chewing manicurist wife, Frenchy (Ms. Ullman), into turning the abandoned store into a cookie shop as a "front." While Ray and his mouse-brained partners in crime battle ruptured water mains, Frenchy's cookies become a runaway success with such bizarre flavors as cinnamon cherry and chocolate-chip-jelly-bean-surprise. Frenchy hires her addled cousin Mae (Elaine May) to take care of the volume, and suddenly Sunset Cookies is on the channel 2 news at 6. Instead of arresting them all, the cops get their own franchise and in one year, the business turns into a baking empire rivaling Nabisco.

The movie shifts focus. The cookie business turns Ray and Frenchy into paragons of tasteless nouveau vulgarity. After striking it rich, Frenchy can finally afford chartreuse pedal pushers and leopard-print tank tops, as well as a status-ready new penthouse decorated with bronze lilies, a carpet that lights up and a collection of leather pigs. Ray misses meatballs and cheeseburgers. Frenchy serves truffles and snails. The small-time crook plot is abandoned, while Woody takes a poke at New York's social climbers, with a number of well-placed poison darts tossed in all the right directions. More laughs ensue when Frenchy drags herself to an expert to teach her class in a flash, the way Arthur Murray taught dancing in a hurry. Hugh Grant plays the suave art collector who turns Frenchy into a culture vulture. "This is where Henry James lived," he points out, on a walking tour of New York's landmarks. Ray looks blank. "The band leader, stupid," sniffs Frenchy.

In the third part of this unhinged triptych, the oily Mr. Grant takes Frenchy to Europe to learn more about burgundies and bordeaux. Ray stays in New York ("My idea of a good time is not a lot of operas and ruins; I get enough sleep at home") and with the dopey Mae as a lookout, masterminds a new plot to steal an emerald necklace from a snobby socialite named Chi Chi Potter (Elaine Stritch). With typical idiocy, he swipes a fake necklace no more valuable than a broken green milk bottle; Mr. Grant turns out to be a fortune hunter; the cookie franchise goes belly up; and they're all back to square one.

It is here that Woody fans expect a surprise ending, but there isn't even a grain of petty larceny left in Ray and Frenchy. The film has no final resolution, no last laugh, not even a payoff. You leave scratching your head with a look of "Duh!" on your face that pretty much sums up the whole 90 minutes. Woody is goofy and a sight to behold in stone-washed denim shorts. Elaine Stritch can still stop you in your tracks with a meaningless, drop-dead one-liner (which is all she gets here). Elaine May sounds dentally impaired, like the victim of some disastrous bridgework. Hugh Grant mainly just plays himself. It's pretty much up to the fearless Tracey Ullman, as a hybrid of Jocelyne Wildenstein, Famous Amos and My Friend Irma, to carry this lightweight fluff, and she steals the picture right out from under everybody else while doing it.

Woody Allen is like a hemophiliac with too many paper cuts and not enough Band-Aids. His fountain of ideas never runs dry, but in Small Time Crooks it doesn't exactly turn tap water into Perrier, either. The actors seem to be making up the plot as they go along. After such recent banquets as Celebrity and Sweet and Lowdown , this is a microwaved hors d'oeuvre, a lazy comedy that is only lazily diverting.

Kaye Ballard Reigns; Mrs. Avis Can Sing

Two jampacked openings last week have boosted my faith in the cabaret scene. At Arci's Place, New York's hottest new club on Park Avenue South, the great Kaye Ballard is back with a funny, musical splash she calls Another Farewell Appearance and, of course, everybody hopes she's kidding. In the good old days, before the Apple was defiled and reviled as a scandal-ridden Giuliani police state, the abundantly talented Kaye was a bright star in Broadway musicals like The Golden Apple and Carnival , and a celebrated fixture after dark in posh watering holes like the Bon Soir and the Upstairs at the Downstairs. These days, a trip to New York from a comfy life in the California desert is rare. But when she's in town, hope springs eternal and sophistication reigns supreme.

In the vaudeville tradition, she grifts and grinds her way through Irving Berlin's "Slumming on Park Avenue," tells anecdotes about Alice Faye and Betty Grable and lets you know in no uncertain terms "if you don't know who they were, then get the hell outta here!" Refurbishing old chestnuts with new lyrics she even pokes fun at herself to the tune of Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather" ("Look at me / an Ace Bandage on each knee / Stormy Weather … Posturepedic shoes in patent leather") and sings 10 consecutive bars of "It Had to be You" like someone having a senior moment.

There's always an abundance of humor in her act, whether she's sending up Martha Stewart's annual too-busy Christmas letter (homemade place mats, napkins, and hand-stenciled ceilings, a 12-course breakfast for 20 and 40,000 cranberries to string before a noon speaking engagement) or trying to figure out the horrors of rap music by "Puff Pastry … er, Daddy." Like all intelligent cabaret performers of a certain vintage, she's discovered the wit, humor and musical savvy of Cy Coleman songs, and pays homage to his two favorite lady lyricists, Carolyn Leigh and Dorothy Fields. She can turn dropping names into a party game. ("Who did Mother Goose and is Helen Reddy now? Who did Lucille Ball and who gave Edith Head?") And a reminiscence about her early days in Manhattan, doing six shows a day at the Strand with Spike Jones and his City Slickers and first discovering the artistry of Mabel Mercer leads into an uncanny and affectionate show-stopping imitation of the cabaret duchess on "If You Leave Paris" that left them cheering.

Nostalgically, she sings tributes to the people who lit up New York in the golden years-Portia Nelson, Bart Howard, Arthur Siegel, Paul Lynde, Jimmy Durante-and makes you wonder where we all went wrong. There's something bracing about having her around. Hilarious and touching, with a heart as big as her girdle, Kaye Ballard has forgotten more about show business than most young performers will ever learn. And yes, she still plays the piccolo.

At the FireBird Cafe, what's left of cafe society is cramming in tight as the Russian caviar to see glamorous chanteuse Yanna Avis conduct a guided tour through a landscape of love that roams sensually from the boîtes of Edith Piaf's Paris to the cellars of Marlene Dietrich's Berlin. Not since I first heard luscious Hildegard Knef in a smoky dive in Berlin have I seen so entrancing and svelte a femme fatale. Singing "Just a Gigolo" with one sequined leg propped on a stool and her haute couture derrière planted on top of the grand piano, it is clear that if this woman has ever eaten a Hershey bar it would have made headlines.

Born in France of Romanian descent, she sings sultry torch songs with equal ease in French, German, Spanish and, of course, English, but she's full of surprises, too. Cole Porter's seldom-heard "Ca C'est L'amour" is a tantalizing centerpiece, but she picks up the pieces and the tempo on Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael's "How Little We Know" and Ervin Drake's "The Friendliest Thing Two People Can Do" with just the right amount of sexy vibrato on the vowels. "Ten Cents a Dance" and "Guess Who I Saw Today" capture two more aspects of love lost, lamented and longed for, and Lucienne Boyer's famous "Parlez-Moi D'amour" is a perfect encore.

Because she's the wife of rent-a-car mogul Warren Avis, this underrated singer has been unjustly ignored by the press, but her polished new act, directed by the talented, Tony-winning Thommie Walsh, is the result of talent and hard work, proving there's more to Yanna Avis than charm, money and a charge account at Elizabeth Arden.