Bill Charlap Trio, Live at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note). This handsomely recorded set, which contains such Charlap standbys as “My Shining Hour,” Gerry Mulligan’s “Rocker,” and Jim Hall’s “All Across the City,” is the next best thing to hearing the best of all possible mainstream jazz piano trios in a club. It’s their finest recording since Written in the Stars, the breakout album that made Charlap a name seven years ago (TT).

The Bridge. In 2004 Eric Steel set up movie cameras near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, filmed twenty-three people diving to their deaths, then interviewed their friends and family members without telling them that he was making a documentary that would also contain footage of the deaths of their loved ones. Is The Bridge exploitative? Does it aestheticize suicide? I find these questions impossible to answer. All I know is that I couldn’t turn my eyes from this deeply unsettling portrait of human despair and its aftermath (TT).

Pink Martini, Hey Eugene! (Heinz). Polyglot pop from the Portland-based highbrow lounge-Latino semi-big band whose music boxes the stylistic compass. Lead vocalist China Forbes is at home with every kind of song from “Tea for Two” to “Dosvedanya Mio Bambino.” Yes, Pink Martini is very clever and very hip–but also great, great fun. A perfect party album, even if you’re the only guest (TT).

Lee Marvin: The Coolest Lethal Weapon (Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, through May 24). Twenty films–several of them first-rate–by the toughest of all possible tough guys. Highlights: Samuel Fuller’s “The Big Red One” (May 18) and Budd Boetticher’s “Seven Men from Now” (May 19) (TT).

Magical Means: Milton Avery and Watercolor (Knoedler, 19 E. 70, up through Aug. 10). Three dozen watercolors, many of them never before shown publicly. The early ones are a bit stiff, but by the Forties Avery had found himself, and the not-quite-abstract works of the Fifties are quietly stunning realizations of his artistic credo: “I am not seeking pure abstraction; rather, the purity and essence of the idea–expressed in its simplest form.” The sumptuous catalogue includes a lucid essay by Ruth Fine (TT).

Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony, Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Telarc). Handsome, shapely performances of the Fifth Symphony, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and Serenade to Music, recorded in breathtakingly vivid digital sound. I can’t think of a better single-CD introduction to Vaughan Williams, for these three works are utterly characteristic and immediately winning. Also included is an elegant little performance by the Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus of the Tallis hymn tune on which RVW based his best-known composition (TT).

Biography (Pearl, 80 St. Mark’s Place, through May 20). Cheers to the Pearl Theatre Company for reviving S.N. Behrman’s 1932 play about a Neysa McMein-like portrait painter who decides to write a tell-all memoir, thus throwing one of her priggish ex-lovers into a snit. Biography is a forgotten gem of American high comedy, and this scintillating off-Broadway revival does it justice (TT).

Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (University of California, $29.95). The last word on the man who made Mickey Mouse talk. No gossip, no nonsense, just an authoritative, lucidly written chronicle of Disney’s life and work by a critic-historian-blogger who knows as much about animated cartoons as anyone alive. Don’t waste time on Neal Gabler’s Disney biography–this is the real right stuff (TT).