Screen (DVD) Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years DVD Think of the most amazing stop-motion animation in history – The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans – Ray Harryhausen created it. This DVD set is a portrait of the artist as a young man, who was so enthralled by King Kong that he created a home studio to experiment with the form. The results: lots of dinosaur clips and family-friendly adaptations of Grimm fairy tales (which appear here with new introductions from the man himself). His talent is evident despite the low-budget nature of the work – dig the way Rapunzel's hair magically braids itself for easier climbing. Bonuses include cool test footage of a Martian from an aborted War of the Worlds film, and rhapsodic approbation from Tim Burton and Peter Jackson. – Chris Baker
Screen (theater) Nobody Knows Life for a Japanese teen should be about anime, videogames, and cramming for exams. Not so for Akira, the lead character in Hirokazu Kore-Eda's harrowing tale. Nobody Knows follows a boy left for months to care for three siblings after his mother abandons the family. Hirokazu's minimalist approach, which focuses in on the fear on the children's faces (especially Akira's, played by a 14-year-old novice who won Best Actor at Cannes), makes the film that much more chilling. – Beth Pinsker
Screen (DVD) Napoleon Dynamite Director Jared Hess's movie follows the misadventures of high schooler Napoleon Dynamite and along the way pays homage to the 1980s �bergeek – you know, the guy with the nylon-and-Velcro wallet. The DVD's killer commentary track reveals which scenes were ad-libbed (like the hilarious chatroom bit), and the new epilogue provides hope for all nerds (wedding bells, anyone?). Was it only, like, one of the best movies I ever saw? Heck yeah! – Erik Malinowski
Music Bright Eyes Digital Ash in a Digital Urn / I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning These two discs find Conor Oberst exploring two very different sides of his repertoire. Digital Ash is a terrific collection of '80s-inspired synth pop. Meanwhile, the acoustic I'm Wide Awake�showcases his singer-songwriter chops; its bare-bones sound is the perfect backdrop for lyrics about love and longing. Oberst has been compared to mope-rock luminaries Robert Smith and Elliott Smith. Here, he's worthy of such praise. – Jolie Lash
Music Michael Mayer Touch Techno's reigning tastemaker (Mayer is cofounder of the legendary Kompakt label in Cologne, Germany) steps forth with a stunning trove of bold, brassy dance tracks. Mayer's DJ sets are famous for long builds and melodic climaxes, and his studio productions are no different. He exploits trance's ecstatic crescendos without being predictable and fuses obscure samples with rock-steady drum programming to make beautiful, boombastic house music. – Philip Sherburne
Music Solex The Laughing Stock of Indie Rock The latest from Dutch record-shop owner Elisabeth Esselink is stocked with enough glib melodies and chutzpah to satisfy even the most humorless music lover. Laughing Stock is a beguiling pastiche of lo-fi folk guitars and disjointed drum machine beats. As apt to conjure Suzanne Vega as the Beta Band, Esselink ultimately calls it a draw on tracks like "Honkey Donkey" and "You're Ugly." This is pop made potent by electronics. – Ryan McCarthy
Music Blood Brothers Crimes The Brothers combine abrasive guitars, math-rock time changes, and stop-start screams to create a sound that's undeniably weird and unnervingly enthralling. "Peacock Skeleton With Crooked Feathers" features a jubilant organ melody, while "Teen Heat" throbs with a Roland 808 bass-drop reminiscent of 2 Live Crew. But the band's attack is best summed up on "Trash Flavored Trash," a punk anthem for disaffected Hot Topic kids who've scrawled "I Hate" on their old Nickelback T-shirts. – Jess Harvell
Games (Cube) Resident Evil 4 The series that digitized the living dead is back for another scare. RE4 eschews stereotypical mindless, staggering zombies for aggressive, crafty ones that can gang up on you to throw weapons and set booby traps. The story unfolds smoothly, aided by zooms, pans, and great shot composition. The incredibly detailed visuals make the game's grimy world come alive and push the limits of current graphics-processing technology. – Brandon Sheffield
Games (PS2) The Getaway: Black Monday The original Getaway was a breakthrough in digital storytelling but a letdown in the gameplay department. This gritty, violent sequel gets both right. It revolves around a London bank heist gone bad, with a cast of more than 20 motion-captured actors. You can race any of 150 licensed vehicles through crowded streets or ditch your car to explore famous buildings and the Underground on foot. It's the closest you can get to a starring role in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. – John Gaudiosi
Games (PS2, Xbox) Mercenaries You're a gun for hire looking for work in the Korean DMZ. You can accept missions from South Korea, China, a faux UN, and even the Russian mafia. To hunt down the 52 most-wanted criminals within the 4-square-kilometer demilitarized zone, you can commandeer tanks, blow up attack choppers with ground-to-air missiles, or call in a plane to drop a bunker buster. The freeform play gets an extra jolt of authenticity from the Havok 2 physics engine (as seen in Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault). – J.G.
Games (PC) Matrix Online Can't we humans, machines, and renegade software programs all just get along? This Matrix-based MMORPG picks up where the movies left off. You're a redpill who's just awoken from pod slumber and is jacked back into the Matrix. You fly, do kung fu, and hack mainframes as you navigate shifting alliances among Zion, Machines, and Exiles. The Wachowskis got comic book vet Paul Chadwick to write the episodic storyline, which will culminate in a world-threatening cataclysm in early 2006. – Matt Brady
Print Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell Choosing a mate, launching a radical new product, diagnosing a heart attack: Such crucial decisions, argues Gladwell, can be made more efficiently with less information. Counterintuitive? Sure, but Gladwell cites compelling research in neuroscience and psychology that proves out "thin-slicing," or focusing on slivers of relevant, common-sense experience in order to make better choices quickly. – Reena Jana
Print Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood Bill Hayes For Hayes, blood is both life force and lethal syrup. He deftly weaves light historical trivia (Roman gladiators drank the blood of vanquished foes) with poignant stories about his relationship with an HIV-positive man. In the end, Hayes turns his morbid fascination with plasma into something approaching a paean. Blood, he writes "makes us blush, bruise, and go pale." His account of the vital fluid is sure to make your heart beat faster. – Jennifer Kahn
Print The Fly in the Cathedral Brian Cathcart Hunching over microscopes and racing to submit papers to Nature hardly make for an obvious page-turner. But the eurekas of the 1920s and early '30s – from quantum mechanics to the particle accelerator – come quickly in journalist Brian Cathcart's history of the quest to split the atom. He aptly captures the rush that scientists felt when, questioning the very foundation of matter, they cracked it open to peer inside. – Douglas McGray
Print Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science M. G. Lord While on a mission to understand her dad, a Cold War-era NASA engineer, Lord unearths a good-ol'-boy, anticommunist culture inside the Jet Propulsion Lab. Her witty criticisms of rocket men who could imagine living on Mars but couldn't dream of women becoming astronauts, are tempered by heartfelt observations about her father. Although he wasn't the space cowboy Lord envisioned, his dedication to designing ship actuators was no less heroic. – Terry Tang
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