Is this the year that G&S became definitively chic again? The slow-burn effect of ENO's "Miller Mikado" and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy now results in numerous fringe benefits. Sasha Regan's all-male Union Theatre regime has delivered its best yet - Iolanthe at Wilton's Music Hall, the most touching and funny show I've seen over the last 11 months - and now Charles Court Opera gives us more witty operetta-in-close-up with a cast of nine backed up by two pianos.

There’s no doubt that In the Realm of the Senses shocked and still shocks, but after watching this first-ever uncut UK release, it’s hard to figure out what shocks most: the sex, the equation of sex, obsession and death, that all this takes place in a sealed environment ruled by ritual, or whether it’s the revelation that Japanese society could produce a film so opposite to its perceived or received persona. It could also be the fact that it's based on a true story.

The star ballerina Sylvie Guillem was rehearsing in London when she heard about the cataclysmic Japanese earthquake last spring, and the devastating tsunami in its aftermath. It was an apocalyptic blow that she felt personally. Since her first visit there as a teenager, the internationally renowned dancer has been drawn back to Japan year after year, winning legions of friends and supporters, the culture’s aesthetic clarity and spareness influencing her taste, and complementing her own evolution from classical ballerina assoluta into contemporary dancer stupenda.

Edit, edit. Inside TeZukA there’s a charming, elliptical, hugely stylish piece begging to be sliced and trimmed into focus - just as the manga master Osamu Tezuka must have daily occupied himself with as he prepared his graphic cartoons. The visuals in Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s piece are spectacular video animations of Tezuka’s fastidiously drawn scenes, the kerpows and the Zen landscapes, Black Jack, the transfigured rabbit. If it does nothing else, this show should whet your appetite for manga.

A new production opens tonight at Sadler's Wells based on the graphic novels of Osamu Tezuka, Japan's master of manga art. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and composer Nitin Sawhney shared a love of comics as a boy that turned into the more sophisticated admiration for the narrative subtlety and precise visions that the best of comics led to. And to Cherkaoui it seemed a compelling world for theatrical treatment.

As well as recounting the stories of two of the women who would become figureheads for the revolutionary movements that grew out of the social unrest of 1968 - Germany’s Ulrike Meinhof and Japan’s Fusako Shigenobu - Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution intriguingly juggles the political and the personal.

Chris Marker has made over 60 films in his long career (he's now 90). But his reputation has rested on just two. Sans soleil (1983), a meditative film essay on Japan, and La jetée (1962), a 20-minute sci-fi film in the ciné-roman photomontage style, are widely considered the finest examples of their respective genres. On top of that, La jetée was named one of the Top 10 sci-fi films of all time by Time magazine. Optimum Classics are re-releasing both this week on one DVD.

Sylvie Guillem is back, chicken-skinny, middle-aged, dressed like a dowd. Did I just write that? And let’s add: as swift as mercury, as exact as a feather, as light as the sun, and as eternal in intelligent beauty as Nefertiti. In contemporary dance, as I was saying at the weekend, it should be permissible to sit in the dark wondering at the inexplicable and the unbelievable. This great ballerina of our era is both inexplicable and unbelievable, in physique and in temperament.