Justice

Berry is bodily a tight fit for the role; as a black woman with universal sex appeal, she has something in common with Dandridge, and what's more, and what's rare, is enough of a star herself to convincingly play a star. (Check out the discount Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner in the party scene.) She's graceful and energetic, handles herself exceptionally well in a couple of dance routines, and is pretty much the only thing you see whenever she's on screen. Klaus Maria Brandauer as lover (and leaver) Otto Preminger, Obba Babatunde (Miss Evers' Boys) as first husband Harold Nicholas, and Spiner offer unflashy support. As Dorothy's mother, the actress Ruby Dandridge, Loretta Devine (The PJs' Muriel Stubbs) is, for me, a special treat: I just love her voice.

TNT'S YOU KNOW MY NAME, IN WHICH A LEGENDARY lawman comes out of retirement to clean up a dirty town, is also based on a true story, but in this case the truth of the story is unimportant; few of us will have heard of Bill Tilghman, and it's enough that the film, which portrays not his long and colorful life as an Oklahoma peace officer but only an episode within it, is a perfectly effective, old-school Western, albeit one set in 1924 with a coked-up Prohibition officer for a bad guy. Sam Elliott, whose résumé runs back to "Card Player #2" in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, plays Tilghman, and he seems clean in a way no contemporary action hero quite does; he may be our last truly convincing screen cowboy. His nemesis is the great Arliss Howard, who goes pretty far over the top this time, but no more than, say, Al Pacino in Scarface. While the film does not escape the usual Hollywood fibs -- the whores are all beautiful, for instance -- it is at the same time unusually convincing: Director-writer John Kent Harrison (in whose William Faulkner's Old Man Howard starred a couple seasons back) has a great sense of landscape, light and ancillary detail; his Cromwell, OK, is a place of Hogarthian life and clutter, and what small holes there are in his picture he covers over with mud and oil and smoke and crowds and rain. It all works. Well told, well played, well made, well done.

STRANGE JUSTICE | Showtime Premieres Sunday, August 29, 8 p.m.

INTRODUCING DOROTHY DANDRIDGEHBO | Premieres Saturday, August 21, 9 p.m.

YOU KNOW MY NAME | TNT Premieres Sunday, August 22, 8 p.m.