They Live by Night. At long last, Nicholas Ray’s 1948 feature-film debut, a sensitive screen version of Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us, has made it to home video in a meticulously remastered version. The cast–Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard Da Silva, and Jay C. Flippen–is impeccable, but it’s Ray’s intensely personal direction that makes this rural film noir so memorable. The DVD also includes another Granger/O’Donnell pairing, Side Street (TT).

Luciana Souza, The New Bossa Nova (Verve). The great Brazilian jazz singer teams up with producer-husband Larry Klein for an album of soft, smooth, infinitely subtle bossa-nova versions of pop songs by the Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, Alison Krauss, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Sting, Steely Dan, and James Taylor, with Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March” thrown in for good measure. Don’t be fooled by the easy-listening patina–this is Souza at her most delicate and appealing, and if it should happen to bring her to the attention of the same mainstream listeners who flipped over Madeleine Peyroux’s Klein-produced albums, so much the better for everybody (TT).

Ace in the Hole (Criterion Collection). Now available on home video for the first time ever, Billy Wilder’s scaldingly cynical film about a washed-up newspaper reporter (Kirk Douglas) who gets hold of a Floyd Collins-like exclusive, blows it up into a media event avant la lettre, and loses what’s left of his soul along the way. Rarely has Hollywood made such films, and this one, not surprisingly, was the box-office flop of 1951. Fifty-six years later, it looks more like a cold-eyed peep into the future of electronic journalism (TT).

Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, Beethoven Complete Symphonies and Selected Overtures (Music & Arts, five CDs). Startlingly vivid new transfers of Toscanini’s 1939 radio broadcasts of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Christopher Dyment calls these performances “the most lucid, dramatic and intense Beethoven cycle ever captured by recorded sound” in his crisply written, comprehensively informed liner notes, and I’m not going to argue. The seventy-three-year-old conductor was at the peak of his ruthless powers, and the NBC Symphony was still an enegetic ensemble of (mostly) youthful virtuosos who were capable of giving as good as they got. Airchecks of the 1939 cycle have been in circulation for decades, but they’ve never sounded half as good as this. Yes, there are other, equally valid ways to play Beethoven, but when you’re listening to this explosively vital set, you’ll likely have trouble remembering them (TT).

NYC Noir (Film Forum, 209 W. Houston, July 27-Aug. 30). Just like the title says. Highlights: Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (Aug. 15), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (Aug. 24-27), Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (Aug. 19-20), and Jane Fonda in Klute (Aug. 28) (TT).

Pilobolus Dance Theatre (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St., July 16-Aug. 11). Half modern dance, half gymnastics, frequently amusing, often enthralling, always watchable. Three different programs this summer, including three new dances and revivals of such favorites as “Day Two” (the company’s wildly sexy signature piece), “Pseudopodia,” and “Walklyndon” (TT).

Andrew Ferguson, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24). This is not a biography of Abraham Lincoln, much less a scholarly monograph, but a kind of intellectual travel book, an account of the author’s visits to Lincoln-related sites and events across America, in the course of which he meets a wildly diverse assortment of Lincoln-lovers and Abe-haters, most of them eccentric in degrees varying from mildly aberrant to near-pathological. Everything he sees and everyone he encounters along the way is described with an engaging combination of dry, sly wit and what can only be described as empathy (TT).

Beyond Glory (Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46, through Aug. 19). Stephen Lang’s fire-eating portrayal of eight recipients of the Medal of Honor has finally made it to New York two years after I saw it at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. “Mr. Lang’s one-man play is no simple-minded piece of flag-waving,” I wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2005. “It is an unsparingly direct portrait of men at war, pushed into narrow corners and faced with hard choices. It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I’ve seen in my theatergoing life.” All still true. This one is an absolute must (TT).