DVD Release: The Best Intentions

The fraught early relationship of Bergman's parents in Bille August's exquisite saga

At long last it's here on DVD: the greatest Bergman movie the master didn't make, though he wrote the most meticulously detailed, 300-page screenplay-cum-novel (which covers all the events of the four-part Swedish TV miniseries rather than the much shorter feature film we have here).  Naturally, too, he approved a luminous performance by Pernilla August who, under her maiden name of Östergren, frolicked as red-headed maid Maj in the film many love best, Fanny and Alexander, and who as the wife of Bille August, the very distinguished award-winning director of The Best Inten

Emma, BBC One

An Austen heroine for Facebookers: the meddlesome Miss Woodhouse logs in again

There’ll always be Austen on the telly. As the Bard is to the boards, so is Saint Jane to the box. The six novels were published (though not all written) in a seven-year period in the 1810s. In a rather shorter tranche of the 1990s they were all adapted for the (mostly small) screen. They’ve now just been done again, on the whole rather less well than the first time round.