It’s too cold to go outside, isn’t it? If you lean toward counteracting the months of frost with a blast of tropicalia, see the "Summer" section of FLICKIPEDIA. But we’ve found that if you’re hunkered down in the warmth of your home, all the better to punctuate the extreme weather outside, from a comfortable distance, of course. Here're just a few of our Christmas-to-February recommendations:

South (1919) Forget the recent movies, IMAX and otherwise, that recreate the doomed Shackleton Endurance expedition of 1914-16 to the South Pole; this astonishing film was shot on the spot by one Frank Hurley, who stood there stranded on the ice with the rest of the crew, watching the ice shelves crush the ship, not knowing whether he was in fact doomed or not, and yet still filming, beautifully. All other movies about polar survival are pretenders by comparison.

The Chechahcos (1924) Amateur Alaskan filmmaker Lewis S. Moomaw’s silent film is an extraordinary Klondike melodrama shot in the northern wilderness and featuring stunning on-location glacier footage. The story is antique, but there’s no denying the veracity of the on-location action. Available on a DVD set titled Treasures from American Film Archives: 50 Preserved Films.

SOS Iceberg (1933) This early sound epic is a prime example of the 1920s-30s specie of German adventure film known as "the mountain film," invented and primarily directed by one Dr. Arnold Fanck, and starring primarily one Leni Riefenstahl, just a few years away from being the Third Reich’s most famous propaganda filmmaker. The key attraction is the copious amount of location footage – when Riefenstahl and her comrades are scouring the Arctic circle for lost comrades, it’s no studio set. Of course, man’s triumph over nature’s adversities is just one shading of the ubermensch obsession that fired the Nazis. Other terrific examples available on disc are The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929) and Storm Over Mont Blanc (1930).

Portrait of Jennie (1948) After Gone with the Wind, producer David O. Selznick’s career project was largely taken over with erecting large, crazy movie-poems in honor of his beloved wife Jennifer Jones, and this unashamedly naive phantasia might be the most lovesick. Joseph Cotten plays a struggling artist in a New York where it’s nearly always snowing, and Jones is a girl that appears to him – and only to him – with a ghostly backstory of her own, inspiring him with her inner light.

Doctor Zhivago (1965) Boris Pasternak’s Russian-revolution love story, done up in ‘60s-epic style by grandmaster David Lean, about a good-hearted doctor-poet (Omar Sharif) swept up in a political storm he cares nothing about. In fact, he’s passive about pretty much everything, including his torn love for both his gentle, devoted wife and legendary beauty Lara (Julie Christie). This is Russia, so the springtimes feel like winters in Minnesota, even if this was shot almost entirely in Spain (!), and the subarctic ambience is completely fabricated out of white wax. Fake or not, the swirling flurries are relentless, and there are moments where you feel like you’re watching the story unfold from inside a snow globe. Doctor Zhivago is over-wrought and visually constipated (so much massive history, so many small rooms), but the Zhivago-Lara-stranded-in-the-ice-house set-piece has a cozy-wintry chill that’s hard to beat.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) This moody, fur-bundled frontier odyssey might be the best Robert Altman film of all. Warren Beatty plays a entrepreneurial rogue who sets up business in a muddy northwestern mining town (it looks, no kidding, as if it were shot in 1830), and eventually teams up with an opium-smoking madam (Julie Christie) looking to set up a whorehouse. Trouble sets in when gangsters try to squeeze the pair out, and resort to authentic prairie ethics to get their way. This movie teems with life like beehive; nobody was better than Altman in filling movies up with believable inhabitants and texture, and here the misty, greasy, snowy reality of range life is evoked like nobody’s business. No chicanery here – this was how Rocky Mountain life (shot in Vancouver) without utilities were like. Even the relentless Leonard Cohen songs begin to get under your skin. The movie is also a dead-lift triumph of the American New Wave – those years between 1966 and 1977 in which Hollywood went out of its way to make gritty, truthful, challenging films you could believe in.

Promised Land (1988) Michael Hoffman’s neglected, "personal" drama tracks the post-school lives of two Utah kids: Keifer Sutherland’s shy, geeky damaged goods, and Jason Gedrick’s basketball star-turned-local sheriff. Meg Ryan co-stars, launching her fledgling career with her portrait of a bipolar nightmare very far from the upturned-nose sweetheart she became famous for. The landscape is frozen, and the characters are lost.

Edward Scissorhands (1990) They have winter in Florida, too, and this lovely, melancholy Tim Burton fantasy is for the Southern-most snow-deprived of Americans. Anyone who’s had rolls of cotton wadding stapled to their hot roof as fake snow will treasure this eagle-eyed film for its satiric take on postwar suburban chintz, but in the end there’s snow after all – born of misfit heartbreak and devotion.

Archangel (1991) A genuine whatzit, this second feature by hermetic Canadian avant-gardist Guy Maddin comes in the guise of a scratched, faded, forgotten movie circa 1930, set in the eponymous Soviet city after WWI, but quite obviously shot on cardboard sets and more believably taking place in Maddin’s movie-crazed headbone. The cheapjack surrealisms and crazy non sequiturs are the joke, covered in fake snow and subject to the harshest winds fans can produce.

Fargo (1996) A poker-faced slalom through the icy fields of true-crime docudrama, Joel & Ethan Coen's cascade of frozen Minnesotan cops and crime is probably the loopiest based-on-fact murder drama ever made, something like In Cold Blood reimagined by Dave Barry. Somehow, the filmmakers tell the snowbound saga of a tumbling-dominoes 1987 permafrost bloodbath – featuring nerve-frayed scam source William H. Macy, wired hired gun Steve Buscemi, and serene pregnant policewoman Francis MacDormand (an Oscar) – as cold realism and yet retain their trademark absurdism and larky rhythms. Having grown up in a Minneapolis suburb, the Coens know the vernacular inside and out; though it often feels like a snarky plummet down a long flight of stairs, the movie ends up being a celebration of quiet banality. By the time we reach the woodchipper, we're as thankful as MacDormand’s Chief Marge that there's a mittened world full of idiotic pleasantries and all-you-can-eat restaurants to go back to.

The Ice Storm (1997) At its heart, this Ang Lee adaptation of the Rick Moody novel is a humane, sane, hilarious and rich-as-mousse dispatch on the woes, risks and costs of the all-American family, climaxing in the very real 1973 winter storm of the title and its largely symbolic fallout. The multiple character study encompasses an affable Dad (Kevin Kline) equally bewildered by his affair with a trendy neighbor (Sigourney Weaver) and his slowly disintegrating family, a haunted Mom (Joan Allen) lost somewhere between girlhood and disillusionment, a rebellious daughter (Christina Ricci) experimenting with shoplifting and mock sex with the neighbor’s boys (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), and a sweet-natured pothead son (Tobey Maguire) impassively grappling with puberty. But the real subject is vain, media-drunk modernity itself, and how it leaves us unprepared for the worst things in life, things that can happen at night when everything’s frozen over.

Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (2001) The first film shot in Inuktitut, this 2 1/2-hour epic about Inuit love, family and betrayal is all Arctic, all the time, shot with a wholly convincing native cast on digital video. Primal, enthralling and very cold.