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1. "Day Night Day Night," dir. Julia Loktev (FILM)

Quite brilliantly, Loktev's movie about a female suicide bomber never explains her motives or makes her strange in order to ease the viewer. Belief allows you to act without seeing everything, no matter your tactic or your cause. It examines such desire to act, the faith involved and, strangely more compelling, the material reality. _ Cynthia Fuchs

2. "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," by Christopher Hitchens (BOOK)

A fire-breathing polemicist in the grand tradition, Hitchens has spleen to spare and wastes none of it here when going after the godly. This is at the least depressing, and at most rage-inducing. How else is one supposed to respond to a book that trods through the inane superstitions that make up each of the world's "great" religions? _ Chris Barsanti

3. Betty Davis, "Betty Davis"/"They Say I'm Different" (2 CDs)

Davis takes the music over the top with her explosively unapologetic songs. Her self-titled debut is funk like no other. Its closest musical relation is Sly Stone's early '70s molasses -- deliberate, moist and bizarre in substance -- but where he often buries his voice within the arrangement, Betty kicks the mic stand over and demands your attention. _ Dan Nishimoto

4. "Away from Her," dir. Sarah Polley (FILM)

Both careful and contrived, this film paints marriage as a series of losses, fulfillments and compromises, infinitely rewarding and painful. The very process of losing is conveyed in delicate fragments. The husband realizes that his own identity is wrapped up in his wife's, and it frightens him to lose that part of himself. _ Cynthia Fuchs

5. "The Riches" (TV)

This comedy is bittersweet, driven by the family's various desires for the "good life" and anxieties about being "found out" or found insufficient or too fake. Such anxieties are, it suggests, the underlying condition of striving for "the American dream." _ Todd Ramlow

6. "Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture," by Jon Savage (BOOK)

Not content to track the explosion of youth culture from the '50s on, Savage goes back to its roots in the 19th century, examining how the connotations of teenagerdom we now take for granted emerged from a wide-ranging variety of sources, including sensationalist journalism, opportunistic marketing ploys, an expanded youth labor market, accelerated fashion cycles and fascist propaganda. A comprehensive study of the invention of adolescence. _ Rob Horning

7. Various artists, "Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten" (CD)

Expansive yet intimate, this soundtrack realizes the goal that many works of biographical art attempt but few accomplish: to depict a complex historical figure in terms sufficient for summary while using a slight enough approach to grant a glimpse into that person's nature. _ Aarik Danielsen

8. Dungen, "Tio Bitar" (CD)

The band that taught indie kids that it's OK to enjoy jazz flute makes a triumphant return. Largely a one-man project by multi-instrumentalist Gustav Ejstes, the band's musical progression has been steady since its inception, from folk and jazz-oriented to guitar-centric. This album continues that growth, wisely opting to keep things simple and stick to the primary strengths of the Dungen sound. _ Adrien Begrand

9. "51 Birch Street", dir. Doug Block (FILM)

As revealed repeatedly, variously and hauntingly, marriage is a different struggle every day.

Now happily married for the second time, Kitty finds herself on camera, questioned by the son of her new husband, who is struggling to understand his parents' marriage, how they lived together and why they stayed together for 54 years, despite the fact that his own mother, Mina, was unhappy, apparently throughout. _ Cynthia Fuchs

10. "Loveless Vol. 2: Thicker than Blackwater," by Brian Azzarello and Marcelo Frusin (COMIC)

A bloody, violent Western in the vein of "Deadwood," this is a story of revenge in the post-Civil War South. Frusin's gorgeous and gritty art perfectly captures the war-ravaged fields of the American countryside, and Azzarello's brutal anti-heroes and even more brutal villains seek grim restitution for past wrongs in a morally ambiguous yet enthralling world. _ Mordechai Shinefield

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