Short List

1| TELEVISION Spectacle: Elvis Costello With ... It's not just the glasses--Elvis Costello really is that smart. On this Sundance Channel Q&A series, the singer, showman and wit talks pop-music history with Elton John, jazz with Bill Clinton and more. Interspersed with cover songs, Spectacle is an engaging showcase for a curious mind.

2| DVD A Colbert Christmas Stephen Colbert spikes the Xmas punch with Willie Nelson as a weed-toting Wise Man, Jon Stewart ambivalently praising Hanukkah and John Legend crooning a hilariously filthy ode to nutmeg. This is to earnest holiday specials what truthiness is to truth.

3| DVD WALL•E Pixar's ravishing robot love story is now on three discs (one for downloading) with loads of fun extras, including a cartoon short and a doc about sound-effects genius Ben Burtt, plus commentary on the film by director Andrew Stanton. He's a great guy to spend a movie with.

4| DVD Chungking Express Wong Kar-wai's 1994 distillation of Hong Kong grunge and glamour weaves four top Asian stars (Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro) into a crazy-tender two-part romance. How can nosebleed-high art also provide fizzy delight? Here's how.

5| DVD The Spy Who Came In from the Cold A realist's corrective to the first flush of Bondomania, this intelligent 1965 film of the John le Carré novel saw the Cold War as a bitter stalemate in shades of gray. Richard Burton and Oskar Werner are the rival agents whose complex loyalties run into a Berlin Wall.

Arts Online For more reviews and openings this weekend, go to time.com/entertainment

Quotes of the Day »

Get & Share
CHRISTINE LINDBERG of Oxford's U.S. dictionary program, on why unfriend was chosen as Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary; it refers to removing someone on a social-networking site like Facebook
For use in rail of Articles page or Section Fronts pages. Duplicate and change name as necesssary to distinguish.

Time.com on Digg

POWERED BY digg

Quotes of the Day »

Get & Share
CHRISTINE LINDBERG of Oxford's U.S. dictionary program, on why unfriend was chosen as Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary; it refers to removing someone on a social-networking site like Facebook

Stay Connected with TIME.com