We carry a few books, and no movies.  If you want to explore beyond the basic bowls of cashews or your social spirit is based with friends and movies we have the following suggestions.

"SABRINA" (1954), paired with a gin or vodka martini, chilled, straight up, with olives.

This is a shiny, polished-looking film with a hugely flawed plot. It seems impossible that the sagging and aged Humphrey Bogart could ever woo the birdlike and very young Audrey Hepburn. But the whole thing looks so great, and liquor is so crucial to the plot, that drinks are certainly in order.

We had our neighbors Trente and Lou and their daughter, Sabina, over to watch — sending the invitation e-mail message "Sabrina with Sabina?" brightened my day. Trente abstained, as she was pregnant, and so did Sabina, as she was 9. But Lou; my wife, Helene; and I did just fine, and with each icy sip, Bogey grew a few years younger.

"A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT" (2004), paired with Lucid Absinthe Superieure.

I like the effect of absinthe — it seems to sharpen my senses, not dull them — but I don't like the taste. Good — I won't drink too much. I remain in full control of my filmic receptors.

"A Very Long Engagement" is a close adaptation of a French novel by the mystery writer Sébastien Japrisot. It has a Chinese puzzle box of a plot: a woman seeks her soldier fiancé who has been missing during World War I. She gets closer and closer, through a web of memories and forgotten details, as time moves farther away from the day of his disappearance.

All the colors in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's adaptation are heightened in a magical-realism way that suggests the effects of absinthe. Yet drinking it somehow cancels them out, and the beauty of simple thought at the heart of the complex plot rises above some of the more distracting visual gimmicks (like being taken inside a bomb to see the firing pin strike).

"I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING!" (1947), paired with The Balvenie Doublewood 12-year single-malt scotch, neat.

The films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have a certain other-worldly quality that suggests someone was sipping something as they were made. In "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), a bride-to-be travels to the Scottish Hebrides to marry a rich industrialist, but ends up falling for a charming, down-on-his-luck R.A.F. pilot.

The film is shot on location: the wind, the cold, the smell of salt off the gray Atlantic seem to seep off the screen like a draft in an old house. Even if you are sitting in your apartment in Brooklyn, as I was, you want to put on a heavy wool sweater and wrap yourself in a blanket. And you want to sip Scotch.

Not chilled, not on the rocks, but neat. The Balvenie needs nothing added to it — it is, to me, a peaty marvel of changing flavors from the moment it hits your tongue to the moment it goes down your throat. Ah, yes. Is that damp grass I feel crunching underfoot as I head down to the loch?

Powell and Pressburger films also have a certain inescapable warmth, and a winking, sly sense of humor. As I swirl that half-inch of amber in the bottom of my glass, I think about how it possesses those same qualities.

"MAD MEN: SEASON 3" (2009), paired with a Rittenhouse Rye old-fashioned (cube of sugar, dash of bitters, two ounces rye; mix them up, add ice and a slice of orange).

It's not a movie, of course, but the production values of "Mad Men" nearly make it one. I started on Season 3, expecting to love it, and was surprised how much I disliked almost all of the characters. They were jerks, sexist, racist, arrogant; even the women were misogynists.

Don Draper was the worst of all. He struck me as a martini man — tall and cool and straight up. Yet he always had an old-fashioned, one that looked like a fruit basket drenched with whiskey. Why, I wondered, would someone with such a streamlined appearance and simple, black-and-white view of the world crave so Rococo a drink?

So I joined him. We became drinking buddies with our old-fashioneds. And I started to warm up to him, to his internal struggles, his life with so many lies in it — it's much easier to let it all out after tossing several slices of orange into several successive glasses.

There, there, Don. There, there.