UK readers should head on over to the BBC iPlayer page to view the first two (of three) 1 hour documentaries on horror cinema presented by League of Gentleman actor/writer Mark Gatiss. This brilliant series looks at horror cinema since the early part of century right through to the classic American period of the 1960s and 1970s with each programme focusing on a particular time period.

Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th marks BBC Films weekend as the filmmaking arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation launches its new television home on BBC Two. The channel will show the network premieres of three of the BBC’s most critically acclaimed films of the last few years – “Is Anybody There”, “The Damned United”, and “Eastern Promises”.

The weekend is a showcase of the BBC’s finest feature film work in its new home on BBC Two. The move to showcase BBC films on the channel is part of the network’s recent Strategy Review which, amongst other things, pledged £25m to the production of quality drama.

Said to be an un-filmable novel (and probably rightly so), approaching the movie adaptation of “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy” you’d be forgiven for wondering just how the hell director Michael Winterbottom pulled it off. Well, he didn’t, exactly. It isn’t that the film doesn’t look at both the ‘life’ and the ‘opinions’ of Laurence Sterne’s titular character, it’s more that it rolls it all up into a bite-size bundle of non-linear narration, film-within-a-film-within-a-film invention, and wry satirical asides which celebrate the originality, humour and post-modern techniques of the original literature.

Sam Peckinpah’s notorious Straw Dogs was banned in the UK for many years. Finally released uncut in 2002 audiences could make up there own mind about the film’s hard-hitting and shocking violence that includes a protracted double rape of a young woman. Whatever way you perceive the film it is undoubtedly a thought-provoking and intense piece of work. Daniel Stephens attempts to pick apart the film’s underlying message.