ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY RECOMMENDS: VIDEO & DVD

EW recommends 'Tenenbaums' and 'Star Trek'

Video: 'The Royal Tenenbaums'

(Entertainment Weekly) -- There's a glamour in the too-smart/beautiful/talented-for-your-own-good ennui that Wes Anderson lovingly lingers on in his charming, Salingeresque ''The Royal Tenenbaums'' (cowritten with star Owen Wilson), about a family of prodigies coming to terms with the compromises of adulthood.

In a timeless almost-New York, the Tenenbaum offspring -- glum, raccoon-eyed playwright Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), neurotic financial whiz Chas (Ben Stiller), and suicidal has-been tennis ace Richie (Luke Wilson) -- suffer the damage caused by early fame and abandonment by their force-of-life father, Royal.

As the suave lawyer-turned-con man who suddenly wants back into his estranged family, Gene Hackman embodies a wonderful combination of inevitability and surprise, whether he's sweet-talking his ex (Anjelica Huston) or taking his overprotected grandkids on a garbage-truck joyride. (Bill Murray, who appears here as Margot's cuckolded husband, showed similar comic vigor in Anderson's ''Rushmore.'')

If ''Tenenbaums'' suffers slightly, it's from its own sense of nostalgia. The film is so in love with its quirky clan of exquisite failures that it -- like the characters -- prefers a fond look back to moving forward.

-- Alice King

Grade: A-

DVD: 'Star Trek: The Next Generation -- Season 3'

Just as there's a giddy kick to looking back on a TV series' beginning, it's a thrilling endeavor to see it hit its stride, and the third season is when ''The Next Generation'' did just that, with episodes like ''The Best of Both Worlds, Part I'' -- the grandest of ''The Next Generation"'s year-ending cliff-hangers, this one found Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) kidnapped by the Borg -- and ''Yesterday's Enterprise,'' the ''Star Trek'' universe's smartest time-travel experiment (and a longtime fan favorite).

This collection is of a piece with the last two boxed sets -- a handful of retrospective featurettes are the only supplements, and they're not bad if you're a newcomer to ''Next Generation'' lore but kind of stale if you're a hardcore geek (and it takes one to know one). Still, these 22 installments represent a high-water mark for episodic ''Star Trek,'' and, as such, for TV science fiction as a whole.

-- Marc Bernardin

Grade: A-