The Best & Worst Videos

Video of the Year

1. The Beatles — The First U.S. Visit
If you were alive in 1964, this remarkable video can both give you back your innocence and correct decades of rose-colored nostalgia. All the wonder of the Beatles' impact is here — the Ed Sullivan performances (in remastered sound, no less), the press conferences — yet the footage makes brutally clear how overwhelmed the Fabs themselves were. And if you weren't alive in 1964, Visit captures a shock wave that still vibrates in what we wear, how we think, what we listen to. Eight years earlier, with Elvis, the culture of youth had staked a claim. This time it triumphed.

Best Wait-for-the-Tape Movies

1. Pump Up the Volume
The epitome of the good little movie that gets ignored in theaters only to find its audience on video. Christian Slater is incredibly charismatic as the high school student whose anonymous pirate-radio rants turn his town, then the country, on its ear. The best teens-run-amok flick since 1979's Over the Edge, Volume is steeped in the end-of-the-world, self-pitying, larger-than-life mind-set of adolescence as you actually may remember it.

2. The Tall Guy
A sweet, goofy, uproarious British comedy that gives Jeff Goldblum his finest role yet. Playing a chronically dazed actor — sort of an American jughead in London — Goldblum falls hard for a nurse (Dead Again's Emma Thompson) whose starchy uniform hides a soul of lust. Halfway through, the movie switches gears to skewer Andrew Lloyd Webber-style musicals, but its wonky romantic charm holds firm. A gem.

3. Aracnophobia
This shrieker from the Spielberg camp (his longtime producer, Frank Marshall, directed) got lost in the box office shuffle because the marketing no-brows couldn't figure out whether to sell it as a comedy or a thriller. Its genius is that it is both — as these spiders crawl through town, your funny bone and ''eyewww!'' reflex work in equal measure — and the humans (Jeff Daniels, John Goodman) are pros. Slick, meaningless, great fun.

Worst Wait-for-the-Tape Movies

1. Funny About Love
Flabby feel-good tripe in which middle-aged cartoonist Gene Wilder wants a child, then doesn't want a child, then wants a child again, then...Christine Lahti and Mary Stuart Masterson look lost while the star tries to pass off his blithering shtick as new-male doubt. It's hard to imagine the man was once funny.

2. Oscar
Sly Stallone's geometrically shrinking career appears to be affecting his mind. How else to explain this witless comedy, so poorly adapted from a French stage farce that you can practically hear the coughing in the front row? The cast is huge and intriguingly diverse — everyone from Tim Curry to Vincent Spano to Ornella Muti — but in the center is a star with a big, fat, terrified grin plastered on his face.

3. The Doors
Even if you liked Oliver Stone's lysergic cook's tour through Jim Morrison's life and times, the home-video version is a tinny souvenir. The early sections remain watchable, but to get across the brute force of Stone's endless concert and orgy sequences, you'd need a big- screen projection TV and a full Sensurround system. For a movie this portentously silly, it's just not worth it. Shorn of its theatrical sound and fury, The Doors signifies nothing.

Music Videos

Best
Red, Hot + Blue
Here's one all-star tribute that stands out — and it's for a good cause. Performers like U2, k.d. lang, the Neville Brothers, and Jody Watley rework Cole Porter, with the proceeds going to AIDS research. The video versions (originally broadcast on ABC) are mostly ingenious, witty, and touching, with the prize going to Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry's riotously snide take on ''Well, Did You Evah!''

Worst
Two Rooms — Elton John/Bernie Taupin
Hands-down winner of the Spinal Tap award for fatuousness above and beyond the call of rock & roll duty. You may enjoy this 90-minute-long tribute to Elton John and his longtime lyricist — both wearing headgear to hide their bald spots — if (1) you need to know the deep inner meaning of ''Daniel'' or (2) you think pop music has all been downhill since 1975. Maybe it has, but these two helped.

Lasersdisc

Best
The Last Picture Show
Criterion Television Classics: I Love Lucy
These two packages contain a wealth of entertaining, informative supplements. Picture Show seems more brilliant than ever, with seven minutes of outtakes restored by director Peter Bogdanovich. The Lucy disc plays like a glossy picture-book of the future: You can watch priceless shtick in two episodes, then delve into acres of production stills, script pages, and biographical text.

Worst
My Fair Lady Special Widescreen Edition
As Audrey Hepburn's cockney Eliza Doolittle might put it, wide-screen my bloomin' arse. Lerner & Loewe's panoramic movie musical has indeed been letterboxed here, but an electronic ''squeeze'' in the images renders the cast anorexic. Worse, video ''enhancement'' intended to sharpen the picture makes it smeary and colorless. Wouldn't it be loverly if CBS/Fox recalled this botch for a makeover?