Miss it the first time?

Whether it’s a fleeting television series or an enduring cinematic classic, chances are good that you can find it on DVD. The format is also the place

to look for specialist fare -- rock documentaries, say, or films that set fashion trends in motion, or boxed sets that trace the careers of legendary performers. A dozen Times critics offer suggestions for discs they deem worthy of a spin, or even of a permanent spot on your media shelf.

Television

Paul Brownfield

“Northern Exposure”: Why can’t they make more like this early ‘90s gem, set in small-town Alaska and starring Rob Morrow as a New York-educated doctor doing his residency among the kooky denizens of the tundra?

“Lost”: If you don’t know what all the fuss is about, you can relive last year’s first season, from plane crash to discovery of a mysterious hatch.

“Late Night With Conan O’Brien: The Best of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog”: Triumph, a creation of writer Robert Smigel, is a foul-mouthed dog puppet/Don Rickles-esque insult comic and regular contributor to “Late Night.” This is a must-see for Triumph’s visit to costumed fans waiting in line for “Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.”

“Cracker”: Great British series, circa 1993, starring Robbie Coltrane as forensic psychiatrist Eddie Fitzgerald. “Fitz,” in addition to being savantish about the criminal mind, has a broken marriage and a gambling and booze problem. A so-called procedural at its best before people were throwing that term around.

“Christmas With SCTV”: Two Christmas specials, from 1981 and ‘82, from the Canadian group that included Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara and the late John Candy. It’s hit-and-miss, but the hits (Dave Thomas as Liberace, for instance, or the extended parody “Neil Simon’s Nutcracker Suite”) are still sublime.

*

Pop music

Richard Cromelin

“The Last Waltz” (Martin Scorsese, 1978): Scorsese’s film is anchored by the Band’s 1976 farewell concert in San Francisco, but with such guest performers as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton et al, it is a towering testimonial to rock’s 1960s generation.

“Dont Look Back” (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967): The quintessential rock documentary on rock’s quintessential poet, Bob Dylan.

“24 Hour Party People” (Michael Winterbottom, 2002): Conveys the euphoric hedonism of the rave scene in Manchester, England.

“Pulp Fiction” (Quentin Tarantino, 1994): Tarantino’s twangs (Dick Dale’s “Miserlou”) and twists (Urge Overkill doing Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”) redefine the music-movie dynamic.

“No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” (Martin Scorsese, 2005): Scorsese’s straightforward approach shows trust in the power of the artist and the early ‘60s.

“Something Wild” (Jonathan Demme, 1986): This dark caper comedy is driven by a great soundtrack, with songs by David Byrne and Celia Cruz and some wild versions of “Wild Thing.”

“A Hard Day’s Night” (Richard Lester, 1964): Some fans complain about the sound mix and picture ratio, but the Beatles’ first movie itself is indispensable.

“Mayor of the Sunset Strip” (George Hickenlooper, 2003): Uncomfortably intimate study of L.A.’s eternal scene-maker, Rodney Bingenheimer, illustrates the hold music can take on someone.

“The Long Goodbye” (Robert Altman, 1973): Altman’s Raymond Chandler adaptation makes a game of placing John Williams and Johnny Mercer’s title song in elevators, Mexican funeral bands, doorbells, etc.

*

Fashion

Booth Moore

“Zoolander” (Ben Stiller, 2001): Many have tried to lampoon the fashion industry, but no one has been more successful than Stiller, casting himself as male model Derek Zoolander with the signature “Blue Steel” gaze. There’s a flimsy plot involving the assassination of the Malaysian prime minister, but all you really need to know is that Hansel (Owen Wilson) is Zoolander’s nemesis. Tension rises until the two decide to settle their differences on the runway in a “walk off,” refereed by David Bowie. Also look for cameos by Karl Lagerfeld, Tom Ford, Tommy Hilfiger and more.

“Legally Blonde” (Robert Luketic, 2001): Harvard didn’t know what hit it when Elle Woods arrived in Cambridge in a hot-pink leather suit, with her dog, Bruiser, in a matching pink varsity sweater. And it’s a joy to watch the East Coast stuffed shirts warm to her over-the-top L.A. style.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (Blake Edwards, 1961): When did the little black dress become the little black dress? When Audrey Hepburn made it so. In every frame of this movie, she’s immensely chic, whether she’s dressed in a Hubert de Givenchy gown or a trench coat, head scarf and oversize black sunglasses.

“Bonnie and Clyde” (Arthur Penn, 1967): Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty may have been on a deadly crime spree, but they looked great doing it, thanks to Theodora Van Runkle. Dunaway’s beret launched a thousand imitators and buoyed the sluggish hat business.

“Sabrina” (Billy Wilder, 1954): Audrey Hepburn goes from gamine in a shoulder-tied boat-neck sweater and toreador pants to gorgeous in a strapless white gown with a trapeze hem, all courtesy of legendary costume designer Edith Head.

“A Streetcar Named Desire” (Elia Kazan, 1951): The white T-shirt became a true fashion icon after Marlon Brando’s rebel yell, “Stella!”

“Flashdance” (Adrian Lyne, 1983): If you forgot “what a feeling” it was to wear off-the-shoulder sweatshirts and leggings, this 1980s style capsule will jog your memory.

“Letty Lynton” (Clarence Brown, 1932): Gilbert Adrian created costumes for dozens of films, including “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Philadelphia Story.” But it was the white organza dress worn by Joan Crawford in this film that spawned a surge of department store copies (Macy’s claimed to have sold 500,000) and cemented the notion that film would have a lasting influence on real-world style.

“The Great Gatsby” (Jack Clayton, 1974): The high society flapper dresses and crisp white suits that Ralph Lauren produced for this Jazz Age drama are still part of his design vocabulary today.

“The Seven Year Itch” (Billy Wilder, 1955): Red-carpet watchers know the power of one dress, and so did costume designer Bill Travilla. His billowy white confection, worn by Marilyn Monroe as she stood over a subway grate, is more memorable than the film itself.

*

Dance

Lewis Segal

The Astaire and Rogers Collection, Volume 1: “Top Hat,” “Swing Time,” “Follow the Fleet,” “Shall We Dance,” “The Barkleys of Broadway”: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made 10 film musicals; here are five, with great songs by the likes of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin. Hollywood never bettered most of them in combining dance quality, star chemistry and choreography perfectly designed for the camera. The new bonus features are highly uneven (the one for “Swing Time” is excellent), but Astaire’s daughter, Ava Astaire McKenzie, trumps all the other experts with her insights and anecdotes.

Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!: Another of Bourne’s typically outrageous remakes of a ballet classic. Oozing dance satire, Act 1 is set in a Dickensian orphanage, Act 2 in the gooiest Candyland imaginable.

*

Classical music

Mark Swed

“Ran” (Akira Kurosawa, 1985): Along with finding innovative ways to bridge East and West, the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu also happened to be a film buff of enormous proportions. He prided himself in seeing at least 300 films a year, and he managed to score an astounding 93 himself. Kurosawa’s “Ran” is one of the great ones, and the Takemitsu East/West Mixmaster is on high speed. There is nothing more telling than his channeling Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” as comment upon a horrific battle scene. A new Criterion Collection release comes out this month full of intriguing extras and is sure to look good. But it won’t include this version’s valuable commentary by Peter Grilli, who was a close friend of the late composer.

“For Ever Mozart” (Jean-Luc Godard, 1996) and “Not Mozart” (Peter Greenaway, 1991): Next year is Mozart’s 250th birthday, and already this season he is inescapable. Godard’s “For Ever Mozart,” a quixotic take on the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, is not about Mozart and barely touches on his music. It is, instead, Mozartean cinema, namely rhapsodic and unpredictable. “Not Mozart” was a wild British television project in which six composers and the same number of filmmakers were let loose for the 1991 bicentennial of Mozart’s death. All six of the 30-minute films that resulted are weird, irreverent and fascinating. “M Is for Man, Music and Mozart” by Greenaway and Louis Andriessen is a small masterpiece.

“L’Amour de Loin”(Peter Sellars, 2004): This new opera by a leading Finnish composer has proved a sensation in Salzburg, Paris, Santa Fe and Helsinki. A medieval romance between a troubadour and his distant love, it features a libretto of exquisite poetry by Amin Maalouf, rapturous music by Kaija Saariaho, stunning performances (especially by Dawn Upshaw), superb conducting by Esa-Pekka Salonen and a production of simple, ecstatic beauty wondrously filmed by Sellars.

“The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant” (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972) and “Lost Highway” (David Lynch, 1997): What these disturbing, visionary films have in common is that uncommonly adventurous operas have lately been based on them. English National Opera just opened its fall season with the premiere of Gerald Barry’s “Petra.” “Highway” was turned into experimental music theater a few years ago by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth and the Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek.

“Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century” (Sir Simon Rattle): Rattle leads an award-winning seven-part tour of the 20th century full of insight, wit, excitement and great music.

“Not on the Lips” (Alain Resnais, 2003): Resnais, the king of cool, the auteur with the clinical X-ray gaze, the director of “Last Year at Marienbad,” has amazingly turned to flippant Parisian operetta of the 1920s. But he manages to be true to then and true to now, as he miraculously brings a genre back from the dead.

“Air Crew” (Aleksandr Mitta, 1980): The most important Russian composer of the post-Shostakovich generation, Alfred Schnittke was also a dissident forced for many years to earn a living taking whatever film work came along. This cheesy Russian disaster film attempts to make Aeroflot look glamorous and Soviet Moscow look trendy. But Schnittke’s wonderfully offbeat score shows he didn’t pioneer what he called Multi-Stylism for nothing.

“Decasia: The State of Decay” (Bill Morrison, 2002): I know of no more compellingly original form of time travel than watching this decayed silent film. Over the years, chemical reactions turned the nitrate of old film stock into visual LSD. A deliriously tuned new instrumental score by Michael Gordon that accompanies keeps you perpetually off solid harmonic ground.

*

Movies

Kenneth Turan

Year-end DVD releases provide the ideal opportunity to catch up on quality pictures that came and went too rapidly.

“The Beat That My Heart Skipped” (Jacques Audiard, 2005): The latest film by Audiard, perhaps France’s most exciting director, is a blistering drama about a pianist-hoodlum that you feel in the pit of your stomach, a jumpy, edgy piece of work that thrusts us into a personal maelstrom so tortured and intense the emotions could be spread with a knife.

“Grizzly Man” (Werner Herzog, 2005) and “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” (Judy Irving, 2003): Two of the year’s best documentary releases highlight the savagery and the grace of the wild side of life.

“Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection” (Alfred Hitchcock): a boxed set containing 14 features, including “Vertigo,” “Psycho,” “Rear Window” and “The Birds.”

Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” (1985) and Francois Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” (1960): A pair of stone classics no collection should be without.

“Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” (Allan Arkush, 1979): An irresistible teen phantasmagoria with the Ramones doing what they do best. After all, what would the holidays be without the Ramones?

*

Theater

Charles McNulty

“All About Eve,” the wittiest backstage movie ever made, holds a special place in my heart for reasons that go beyond art. While studying drama in the early ‘90s in New Haven, Conn., I lived in what was formerly the Taft Hotel, where the viper-tongued critic Addison De Witt confronts Eve before the opening of her show’s pre-Broadway tryout.

Obviously, location isn’t everything. (I lived opposite the West Village apartment house where “Friends” supposedly took place, and it didn’t turn me into a devotee of the sitcom.) No, my fondness for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s masterpiece has to do with the way it captures the glamorously rocky theater scene -- and delightfully confirms my own experience of it.

Because too many people already know the film by heart, “All About Eve” doesn’t appear on my list. I’ve also excluded the greatest movie ever made from a great play (“A Streetcar Named Desire”), Mike Nichols’ distinguished adaptations (from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to “Angels in America”) and all of Shakespeare.

The common thread in the works that remain is the uniquely theatrical charge they deliver again and again:

“Opening Night” (John Cassavetes, 1977): Cassavetes at his most unrestrained is an acquired taste, but Gena Rowlands as the alcoholic stage actress grappling with age and mortality delivers one of the most psychologically acute portraits of a performer in extremis.

“The Homecoming” (Peter Hall, 1973): Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” may have made for a better movie, but this is the Nobel laureate at his unadulterated best. Watch Ian Holm and Vivien Merchant invest overwhelming sexual menace in the prospect of removing a water glass.

“My Own Private Idaho” (Gus Van Sant, 1991): Van Sant movingly translates Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” into a tale of two hustlers, one the scion of a mayor, the other a narcoleptic naif, with a drugged-out Falstaff along for the ride.

“Born Yesterday” (George Cukor, 1950): Judy Holliday reprises her Broadway triumph in one of the screen’s master classes in comic acting. The secret to Holliday’s Oscar-winning success: The joke’s never on her character.

“Beckett on Film” (Pearse Lehane, 2003): A fearless gang of directors (including Atom Egoyan, Neil Jordan and Anthony Minghella) takes on a playwright who can conjure up profound existential revelations with just a few pages of stage directions.

“Glengarry Glen Ross” (James Foley, 1992): A dream cast, led by a sublimely phony Jack Lemmon as salesman Shelley Levene, lends cinematic verite to David Mamet’s signature dog-eat-dog dialogue.

“Seance on a Wet Afternoon” (Bryan Forbes, 1964): One of the 20th century’s most potent stage actresses, Kim Stanley, left little film record of her work. Here, her occult powers of sympathy transform a felonious medium into a tragically bereft mother.

“Theater of Blood” (Douglas Hickox, 1973): Vincent Price portrays a Shakespearean actor who takes Jacobean-style revenge on a posse of underappreciative critics. On second thought, forget I even mentioned it.

*

Television

Robert Lloyd

“Wonderfalls”: A Gen-Y underachiever (a degree in philosophy from Brown, a job in a Niagara Falls souvenir store) is assailed by cryptic messages from wax lions, lawn flamingos and mounted fish, prompting her to do good in this eccentric fantasy with a bit of a bad attitude. Thirteen episodes were filmed, four aired; cult status assured this DVD release. Here is what you missed.

“Freaks and Geeks”: This DVD set is exemplary not merely because it preserves the entirety of one of TV’s greatest and unluckiest series -- a comedy about teens on the margins of high school society in 1980 -- but because between its nearly 30 commentary tracks (not only from the creators, writers, directors and actors, but also from network executives and fans) it paints a portrait of a community, and tells you everything you could want to know about how a TV series lives and dies.

“Degrassi Junior High”: A show about kids in the ‘80s actually made in the ‘80s, “Degrassi” was ardently issue-oriented and crisis-filled without ever compromising its naturalism or the believability of its characters. None of that “after-school special” stuff here. Made with a modesty that somehow says “Canada.”

“The Adventures of Pete & Pete”: Just released is the second volume of this sui generis, ragtag, independently minded Nickelodeon series about two brothers named Pete, the steel plate in Mom’s head, the strongest man in the world and the epic mysteries of ordinary life. Includes the essential “Space, Geeks and Johnny Unitas.”

“The Rockford Files -- Season One”: The best private eye show ever, with James Garner bringing a little Maverick into his Marlowe. If you punched him, he bruised. One of the few TV gumshoes to live within his meager means (in a trailer), where he was routinely bothered by a sublimely quirky supporting cast that included Stuart Margolin as Angel and Noah Beery Jr. as Rockford pere.

“Alice in Wonderland”: Jonathan Miller’s strange and beautiful BBC film is textually faithful -- there was no script, they just copied out whatever bit of the book they were to film that day -- and attempts to get into the head of a Victorian child. Shot in black and white on period locations in ordinary Victorian dress with a soundtrack by Ravi Shankar and a cast including Peter Sellers, John Gielgud, Peter Cook (as the Mad Hatter) and Leo McKern in drag as the Duchess.

“The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus”: Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam and (wonderful) Spam. Plus a dead parrot, Confuse a Cat Ltd., the unexpected Spanish Inquisition, a cheese shop with no cheese, and all the rest.

“The Muppet Show -- Season One (Special Edition)”: Kermit, Piggy, Fozzy et al bring back vaudeville in this felt-covered variety show, finally getting a chronological release. (Thematically packaged sets of episodes have been available for a while.) Among the special guests in the surprisingly long-ago first season (1976-77) are Charles Aznavour, Candice Bergen, Lena Horne, Vincent Price, Twiggy and Peter Ustinov.

“Cosmos Boxed Set”: First broadcast in 1980 and new to DVD (with some updates to reflect subsequent science), Carl Sagan’s 13-hour PBS history of everything looks at humans in relation to the universe, and the universe in relation to humans. You will note the disparity in size.

“The Edward R. Murrow Collection”: George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck” is giving broadcast news legend Murrow another moment in the pop-cultural sun. See the genuine item here, in modes ranging from mild (a profile of Grandma Moses) to muckraking (“Harvest of Shame,” his landmark report on migrant workers), to the McCarthy reports that inspired the film.

*

Movies

Kevin Thomas

“Sunset Blvd.” (Billy Wilder, 1950): It’s the definitive movie about Hollywood past, present and forever. Wilder captured the grandeur of the silent era with wit and compassion and everyday life at Paramount just as TV was coming in and Cecil B. DeMille was nearing the end of his reign. Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond is unforgettable in her pretentiousness and vulnerability. Yet in her madness, as she descends her staircase for the newsreel cameras, Norma sums up what the movies are all about: “There’s nothing else. Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there.”

“It Happened One Night” (Frank Capra, 1934): This Hollywood classic has such verve and good humor that it will probably remain forever fresh. The film is about a runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert) who is cut down to size by a breezy, resourceful newspaper reporter (Clark Gable) while on a bus trip from Miami to New York. It is studded with immortal moments in screen comedy, even as it effectively demolished social pretense and helped launch the entire cycle of screwball comedies that brightened the bleak ‘30s.

“Gone With the Wind” (Sam Wood, George Cukor, 1939): Arguably the most durable American screen epic of them all. The great thing about “GWTW” is that it has different meanings at different ages; the older one gets, the more it seems about survival rather than romance.

“Lola Montes” (Max Ophuls, 1955): Ophuls’ masterwork transformed a boudoir tale exploring the scandalous life of dancer Montes into a dazzling evocation of a vanished age, with its richly romantic spirit and equally unflagging hypocrisy.

“The Crowd” (King Vidor, 1928): Vidor’s pioneering exploration of the treacherous, self-deluding underside of the American Dream is at once the story of Johnny Sims and also of every ordinary American man who grows up believing he is somehow different yet is patently “one of the crowd” and who is struck by both good fortune and tragedy without warning.

“Sunrise” (F.W. Murnau, 1928): In this poetic fable of guilt and redemption, Murnau transports the audience, via a trolley ride, from the innocent pastoral beauty of the countryside to the city, with its bright lights and glittering amusement zone. Murnau captures in striking detail the impact of this world on a farmer and his wife -- the lure of the city ultimately a seductive threat to the couple and their happiness. It remains one of the most striking moments in the silent cinema.

“The Leopard” (Luchino Visconti, 1963): In period, scope and story, Visconti’s masterpiece, starring Burt Lancaster and set against Italy’s turbulent era of unification in the 1860s, brings to mind “Gone With the Wind” as a rich evocation of a crumbling aristocracy -- particularly with its recent release in its original full-length 205-minute Italian version.

“Seven Men From Now” (Budd Boetticher, 1956): Randolph Scott plays a strong, silent type crossing a desert, whose encounter with two men leaves them dead but whose second encounter, with a married couple trying to get to California by covered wagon, finds him lending a helping hand. We learn about Scott and his mission gradually as the film builds tautly and surely to a finish of resounding impact.

“Monsieur Verdoux” (Charles Chaplin, 1947): This is a withering attack on the evils of capitalism -- not exactly what postwar audiences wanted to hear, especially with the Cold War warming up. Today, however, the pitch-dark satire seems timelier than ever.

“I Vitelloni” (Federico Fellini, 1953): A humorous yet melancholy portrait of a group of layabouts filmed in Fellini’s hometown, Rimini, an ancient seaside community. Fellini celebrates the simple, eternal pleasures of the town, but the nostalgic emotions he stirs sharpen the painful awareness that these friends are mired in a stagnant environment and their own immaturity.

*

Pop music

Robert Hilburn

“Dont Look Back” (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967): While Martin Scorsese’s recent “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” project for PBS was an endlessly fascinating look at rock’s greatest songwriter, it basically told what it was like to be around Dylan in the ‘60s. Pennebaker’s documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour of England is more absorbing because it shows what it was like to be Dylan. It is a penetrating, unsentimental portrait of a great artist who was torn between reaching for fame and disdaining it.

“A Hard Day’s Night” (Richard Lester, 1964): Lester’s wonderfully entertaining look at the early days of Beatlemania captured spectacularly the way the Beatles seduced us with their personalities as well as their music.

“Gimme Shelter” (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, 1970): This documentary centers on the limits of rock ‘n’ roll power. Just when the Rolling Stones seemed to be a force as powerful as nature, the band members stood around helplessly while a member of the audience was stabbed to death in front of them.

“The Harder They Come” (Perry Henzell, 1972): In this tense, convincing film set in Jamaica, Henzell used the story of a poor young reggae singer (played by Jimmy Cliff) to examine corruption in the music business and beyond.

“This Is Spinal Tap” (Rob Reiner, 1984): A satire that allowed us to laugh at some of the absurdities of rock ‘n’ roll stardom.

“The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” (Julien Temple, 1980): Temple’s pseudo-documentary about the Sex Pistols also finds lots to ridicule in the rock ‘n’ roll star-making machinery.

“High Fidelity” (Stephen Frears, 2000): The charm of Frears’ delightfully funny rock ‘n’ roll movie is that it’s not about musicians, but about us -- the obsessed fans.

“24 Hour Party People” (Michael Winterbottom, 2002): A funny and astute look at the rise and fall of a Manchester, England, music scene (Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, etc.) so drug-filled and chaotic that it earned the city the nickname “Madchester.”

“Boyz N the Hood” (John Singleton, 1991): Think of this film as the “Harder They Come” of hip-hop, though the emphasis is on the culture, not the music. Ice Cube stars.

“Loving You” (Hal Kanter, 1957): Too bad Pennebaker wasn’t following Elvis Presley through the South in the mid-’50s. This fictional movie, starring Presley as a country boy turned rock star, is as close as we can probably get to the exuberance of the time.

*

Architecture

Christopher Hawthorne

“My Architect” (Nathaniel Kahn, 2003): When Kahn’s film about his father, Louis Kahn, was released, it joined a rich list of documentaries related, in one way or another, to architecture. These include the Maysles brothers’ fabulous 1975 “Grey Gardens,” about an eccentric mother and daughter and their crumbling mansion in East Hampton; 1997’s “Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center”; and Thom Andersen’s “Los Angeles Plays Itself.”

But “My Architect” reveals more about psychology and architecture -- and the relationship between the two -- than any of those films. Nathaniel is Louis Kahn’s son by one of his two mistresses; as a child, Nathaniel saw his father, who died in 1974, only on occasional late-night visits.

The film, charmingly and cannily naive, charts Nathaniel’s architecture pilgrimage to see Kahn’s small but masterful collection of buildings around the world and to interview his friends and collaborators -- including some pointed questioning of his mother, Harriet Pattison, a landscape architect who worked with Kahn and, like most of the women who knew him well, seems as smitten with him as ever.

“Barton Fink” (Joel Coen, 1991): Nearly all of the Coen brothers’ movies make evocative use of the built environment -- remember the overhead shot of William H. Macy’s character, Jerry Lundegaard, trudging through a snow-covered parking lot in “Fargo”? -- but none as memorably as this one, set largely inside a room at Hollywood’s down-at-the-heels Hotel Earle, where John Turturro’s Fink battles writer’s block and peeling wallpaper.

“City of God” (Fernando Meirelles, Katia Lund, 2002): A frenetic story about the street gangs of Rio, it is the best cinematic exploration yet of the world’s emerging megacities.

“Crash” (David Cronenberg, 1996): Not the preachy recent movie by Paul Haggis but the one with James Spader and Elias Koteas as car accident fetishists, from a novel by the architecturally obsessed J.G. Ballard. The most beautiful shots of freeways ever filmed make up for a horribly miscast Holly Hunter.

“Heat” (Michael Mann, 1995): Now available in a 10th anniversary DVD, Mann’s crime saga kicks off with a shootout at the Bonaventure Plaza and includes beach house scenes rendered in cool, slate-blue tones. For a similar take on the L.A. cityscape but with bigger explosions, try “Die Hard.”

“The Incredibles” (Brad Bird, 2004): Finally, the good guys instead of the villains get to live in the sleek midcentury digs.

“Lost in Translation” (Sofia Coppola, 2003): A movie about the melancholy and anomie of Tokyo and, by extension, of all modern, sprawling cities.

“Metropolis” (Fritz Lang, 1927): Lang was the son of an architect and studied architecture, and it shows in this silent classic, set in a futuristic city. It’s the template for a slew of later films, including “Blade Runner,” “Gattaca” and “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”

“Playtime”: (Jacques Tati, 1967): A funny takedown of International Style architecture and its pretensions.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968): Sleek, Space Age futurism at its finest; Philippe Starck has clearly watched it a thousand times.

*

Latin music

Agustin Gurza

“Girando Bari 2005”: This comprehensive package offers an inside look at Ojos de Brujo, the enchanting flamenco fusion band from Barcelona, Spain. The title refers to the world tour for the group’s stirring second album, “Bari,” which defined its sound within a movement called musica mestiza, a blend of many musical currents, including flamenco, funk and hip-hop. The DVD, distributed in the United States by Harmonia Mundi, features concert footage, a one-hour documentary and four videos from “Bari.” It all supports the claim that this is one of the greatest bands working in the Spanish language today.

“Blanco y Negro: Bebo & Cigala en Vivo”: A sterling portrait of the great duet between Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes and flamenco gypsy singer Diego El Cigala, featuring an 80-minute concert and a documentary on their unexpected but fruitful collaboration.

“Los Van Van: Live at Miami Arena”: More than three hours of great music in one DVD and two CDs from the groundbreaking 36-year-old Cuban dance band Los Van Van, focused on its first appearance in Miami, where angry protesters simply served to spark the performance.

“Chosen Few: El Documental”: You don’t have to like reggaeton, the latest Latin craze, to appreciate the in-depth cultural and social history documented in this Boy Wonder production, featuring various artists and interviews with such pioneers as Vico C.