This week’s new film are somewhat overshadowed by both the re-releases and the TV box-sets but there is still plenty of good stuff about (discounting Made Of Honour of course) with the head of the pack being Woody Allen’s much maligned but excellent Cassandra’s Dream (reviewed here). Elsewhere there is Neil Young’s concert documentary CSNY Deja Vu and the pretty good Ghengis Khan biopic Mongol.
Moving onto the re-releases, this week sees two notoriously censor-baiting films getting full on special edition treatments. First up, is the tour de force of cinematic uncomfort that is Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini’s 
1975 reworking of the Marquis De Sade’s book sees a group of Italian fascists humiliate and torture a group of young men and women and is grim stuff indeed but, if you can sit through it, there is a method to the madness. Not one for repeat viewing (once is enough) but the release is crammed with enough info and insight about the film (including a very good Mark Kermode documentary) it is still worth space on your shelf.
Then we have Caligula. Just as notorious for it’s violence and sexual content (again packaged with enough extra / background material to warrant a purchase) this is a film that veers between the striking and the inane with a decent dollop of the insane thrown in – this adds up to a wildly uneven must see mess.
The final re-release (ish) this week is Zodiac: The Director’s Cut. To be honest with you the extra four minutes are pretty much negligible but it is a masterful film (Fincher’s best in my view) and instead of the last vanilla disc this version is packaged with a feature length documentary about the real life case and plenty to get your teeth into regarding the production itself.
Plenty of good stuff on the TV front as well this week with Jericho: Series 2 bringing the nuclear bomb drama to a satisfying (if not as good as hoped) ending but the real gem is ITV’s Lost In Austen. After years of Austen adaptations and BBC’s success with Life On Mars, it must have seemed like a bit of a commissioning no-brainer (“we’ve already got the costumes!”) to send a modern girl into the near sacred Pride and Prejudice and wait for hilarity to ensue. Of course this sounds positively awful but in a stroke of content over concept it was actually a very entertaining series crammed full of interesting plot twists, insightful humour and a willingness to upset some (if not all) of our expectations.
