Although DVDs can never replace the theatre experience, home viewing does afford an escape from annoyances like rustling candy wrappers or Chatty Cathys. For those on your Christmas gift list who like to cocoon, here is a variety of DVD boxed sets to help make winter hibernation more stimulating.

Hollywood

With this month's release of The Jason Bourne Collection, three of the smartest action movies ever made are available in one place. Based on the books by Robert Ludlum and starring Matt Damon, this fast-paced trilogy mixes espionage with car chases to create serious suspense.

For the film enthusiast with a taste for the classics, the Stanley Kubrick Collection was given a DVD rerelease in October. Covering the famed director's best-known movies (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut), this is a definitive collection, despite being incomplete. The picture and sound are topnotch, and DVD extras are plentiful enough to satisfy even die-hard Kubrick fans.

> Travis Lupick /p>

Television

The first season of the Canadian-made Little Mosque on the Prairie was released in November and offers good-natured but daring comedy. It's an unabashed look at Muslim life in the small-town prairies, and lighthearted laughs mingle with important social commentary.

For preteen girls, Fox has put The O.C.–The Complete Series Collection in stores for the holidays. The story unwinds a little midway through the third season, but always delivers on its promise: good-looking people, lots of money, and intense, adolescent drama. Weighing in at 28 discs, the collection guarantees the slumber parties never have to end.

While the reruns seem to play 24 hours a day, there is something special enough about Seinfeld to make the boxed set worth purchasing. Included are all 180 episodes, plus 104 hours of fun and interesting extras. Seinfeld–The Complete Series was released on DVD in November. It's the perfect gift for a long-time fan, or the recluse who has somehow never seen it.

> Travis Lupick

Documentary

The Up Series (a six-DVD set) compiles the well-known documentary series by Michael Apted that followed a group of people as they were filmed every seven years. From Seven Up to 49 Up, you can now watch their lives unfold in one of the prototypical cinematic forms of reality TV.

For the more hard-core documentary addict, the Global Warning boxed set (packaged in biodegradable, 100 percent recycled material with vegetable-based inks) will give viewers plenty of topical substance to watch, think about, and discuss. One of the three documentaries is Manufactured Landscapes, which reveals what we don't see when we buy a made-in-China product: how Western demand for cheap production is transforming China into factories that stretch to the horizon. Peak oil is another problem that will affect us all, and A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash goes on an international journey to expose our lack of preparedness for it. The Refugees of the Blue Planet shows that for the first time in history environmental disasters have displaced more people than war.

> Craig Takeuchi

International

The film world lost Sweden's great Ingmar Bergman this past July, but his legacy lives on in his films. Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks packages together The Virgin Spring, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Smiles of a Summer Night with a documentary, Ingmar Bergman Life and Work, by filmmaker Jorn Donner, and commentary from director Ang Lee and several scholars of Bergman.

For the German-cinema aficionado on your list, here are two suggestions. Lubitsch in Berlin includes four recently restored films by director Ernst Lubitsch from the 1920s. Also available is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in a seven-disc set. At 16 hours, this gift will keep on giving.

Speaking of epic films, for those who missed the marathon screening of War and Peace at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que this fall, you can now buy the 1968 version (directed by Sergei Bondarchuk) in a three ­-DVD set or the 1972 TV series (directed by John Davies) in a five-DVD set.

And if you have any Akira Kurosawa fans to give to, you may want to consider a DVD gift certificate. On January 15, Criterion will release Postwar Kurosawa, a five-film collection by the Japanese master that includes No Regrets For Our Youth and The Idiot.

> Craig Takeuchi