Love Story

Adapted from an H. E. Bates short story called "The Little Farm," director Colin Nutley's Under the Sun is an odd but oddly compelling tale about a lonely middle-aged farmer and the beautiful blonde who responds to his ad for a housemaid. Recalling the Dogme 95 film Mifune in its basic premise and setting (woman responds to ad for maid at rundown farm) but certainly not in its style or tack, this pastoral romance is, in fact, a coming-of-age story. At 40, the solitary Olof (Rolf Lassgard)

ACTS OF FAITH Fiction. By Erich Segal. Bantam. $23 You have to hand it to Erich Segal. He found a formula that worked in Love Story - the romantic '70s pairing of two culturally divergent lovers - and has tried once more to hit pay dirt with the same plot premise. By expanding on this theme, carrying it over a 25-year time span and several continents, Segal might actually have one convinced that he's taking some literary risks. But don't be fooled. Acts of Faith is not only filled with recycled ideas, but they're ones that don't seem nearly as ingenious and sincere the second time around.

It feels like just yesterday, but it was almost 12 years ago that the wedding of Laura Webber Baldwin to Lucas Lorenzo Spencer on "General Hospital" became the most-watched daytime soap opera event in history. Well, set your VCRs because, after nine years away from "GH," Luke and Laura (Anthony Geary and Genie Francis) are returning to the show tomorrow, just in time for the November TV sweeps. For those who weren't always swept away by the couple or need a refresher course, here is a quick look back at their 14-year love story: 1979:Laura is introduced to streetwise Port Charles newcomer Luke, who had been enlisted by his sister, Bobbie, to break up Scotty and Laura.

"There's something important we have to talk about. " Katie made that remark often to her husband, Winnie, in their 35 or so years of marriage, but when she says itat the beginning of Gorked! (A Love Story), the circumstances are a bit out of the ordinary. Katie, you see, has been dead for five years, and Winnie has entered the seeming oblivion of advancing Alzheimer's disease. The "something important" Katie has to say is that it's time for Winnie himself to die - or as the irreverent wife puts it, employing a slang term for dying that hospital personnel use among themselves, it is time for her husband to be gorked.

There ain't many sure things in the mixed-up world of showbiz, honey, but you can take this one to the bank: Twelve months from now, or whenever the rights become available, half the resident theaters in the country will be doing Dirty Blonde. The play by Claudia Shear, which has reopened at Broadway's Helen Hayes Theatre after a sold-out Off-Broadway run, is a resident-theater natural - one set, three actors and a great star role. But here's the best part: It's also a lovely little comedy, half contemporary love story and half evocation of that legendary sexpot and (in the play's term)

At 8:20 p.m., on Tuesday, Aug. 29, a young black woman, accompanied by a boy of about 12, walked into the crowded viewing room at Petner's Funeral home at Frankford Avenue near Levick Street. Neither of them spoke to the grieving white foster family that loved the black child now in a casket. The Brzozowski family lives on Knights Road in the Northeast. They are the only family the 2 1/2-year-old girl ever knew. The uninvited visitors moved on reluctant feet toward the small open casket, stood for a moment in silence, and then turned to leave.

"If you could just watch the news and turn it off . . . " mused Donald Freed. "But you get involved. . . . " Freed has made a career of getting himself involved with the news; he is particularly attracted to news stories with a political connection. He has written or collaborated on books about the Kennedy assassination, the black- power movement and the 1976 murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier. He writes political plays, too, including Inquest, an attack on the government's conduct in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case; Veterans Day, an antiwar dark comedy involving a plot to assassinate a U.S. president; and Circe and Bravo, about an outspoken first lady who is held captive by a Secret Service agent.

For Ken Friedman, writing a book came as the result of a series of "wake-up calls. " Such as the one he received when he taught retirees and ended up learning even more himself, and the one he got the day he decided he didn't want to commute to the city every day, and so announced he would work at home. Friedman's adult life has been a series of changes - all for the better, he says - and his increasing self-awareness is the basis of his first book, The Decision Tree. It's a self-help book in fiction form - a love story about two people who meet by happenstance and develop a life together.

Be honest. You strut around carrying tiny objects in your pocket bearing the phrase E Pluribus Unum. Friends and enemies consider you a carpe diem type. When the boss makes you mad, you've been known to think sic semper tyrannis, like John Wilkes Booth. And if flaunting your Latin weren't enough, close observers say you toss off Greek words like gyro and souvlaki with near native fluency, and occasionally argue other people out of platonic positions. You're in luck. Do we have a play for you!

Seven Pounds is one part jigsaw puzzle, one part The Giving Tree and both parts marinated in melancholy. For most of the movie, its director Gabriele Muccino ( The Pursuit of Happyness ) offers shards of narrative, daring us to fit together the jagged pieces. Which is also what his protagonist Ben Thomas (Will Smith, uncharacteristically heavy-hearted) is doing, only first he's picking them up. In a forlorn voice-over, Ben says that while the Lord created the universe in seven days that he, Ben, destroyed his world in seven seconds.