12 Delights of Christmas

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Samurai movies ... you mean Kurosawa? Yes, but not only. Beyond The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo lay the buried treasures of Japan's richest genre, dug up and handsomely packaged by the smart folks at Criterion. Sharpest of the four here: Masahiro Shinoda's vigorous, cynical Samurai Spy. Weirdest: Kihachi Okamoto's Kill!, a spaghetti Eastern, with clangorous guitars and an astronomical body count, inspired by the Clint Eastwood--Sergio Leone hits that were inspired by Yojimbo. And here we are, back at Kurosawa.

JOHN WAYNE SIGNATURE COLLECTION

Warner $39.98

To many of the Vietnam generation, Wayne embodied the American primitive--grudging and unbudging--that the rest of us were evolving from. That shortchanges him as actor and icon. He contained his own contradictions, as the tough man who led gentle folk to a civilization in which he would never be at home. This package includes his starmaking role, in John Ford's Stagecoach, plus his two flat-out masterpieces: Howard Hawks' limber, majestic Rio Bravo, and Ford's The Searchers, the most potent essay on race, sex and violence Old Hollywood produced. See it and learn, pilgrim. --By Richard Corliss

BOOKS

The must-read list of 2005 is full of disorienting stories and rethought histories

FICTION

SHALIMAR THE CLOWN

Salman Rushdie

398 pages; $25.95

Early on in Shalimar the Clown a diplomat is stabbed to death by his chauffeur. It takes Rushdie the rest of this absorbing novel to explain why. Prowling restlessly backward and forward through the 20th century, he follows the principal players from country to country, through World War II and the struggle between Pakistan and India for control of the Edenic villages of Kashmir. Everywhere he takes us there is both love and war, in strange and terrifying combinations, painted in swaying, swirling, world-eating prose that annihilates the borders between East and West, love and hate, private lives and the history they make. --By Lev Grossman

NEVER LET ME GO

Kazuo Ishiguro

288 pages; $24

You're better off not knowing precisely what is amiss at the exclusive English private school Hailsham. But something is definitely off. The teachers are afraid of the students. The students are afraid of the forest. And nobody wants to put into words just what exactly is going on here. Set in a creepy alterna-England, Never Let Me Go is a horror novel, but it is less about fear than it is about a deep, existential sadness that the world is such a horrifying place. By the time you learn the secret, it's much too late: you've been drawn into this strange amalgam of science fiction and high literature, and it won't let you go. --L.G.

SATURDAY

Ian McEwan

289 pages; $26