Like every young nerd everywhere, I was a pretty huge fan of Monty Python as a kid—I had just never seen anything so unabashedly silly and absurd, and the troupe’s inimical Britishness and sense of faux-pompousness added a whole other veneer of appealingly strange hilarity. And like most fans (I suspect), I eventually got tired of the whole Monty Python “thing,” the famous lines repeated ad infinitum, the same old sketches repeated over and over again, until, by the time I was in my late teens, I had no desire to ever see anything Monty Python-related ever again.

But a strange thing happened this week. It’s the 40th anniversary of the troupe, and to commemorate that, a six-part documentary series, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut) was produced for IFC in the States and released here on DVD. Out of curiosity, I popped in the first disc… and I was hooked. The doc is ridiculously thorough—each of the six episodes is nearly an hour long and they go into deep, personal detail (all of the surviving members are interviewed and they’re all quite candid). I never thought I’d return to Python, and I’m not even sure I have any desire to watch the movies or sketches again, but I found Almost the Truth to be a fascinating portrait of the group and its creative process.

Feels like it’s been a while since Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo was in theatres, but it finally arrives on DVD this week. An audacious and thrilling portrait of notorious Italian politician Giulio Andreotti (played with Karloff-like strangeness by Toni Servillo), Il Divo is gripping even if you know next to nothing about the Byzantine world of Italian politics. Most of the major developments and crises of Italy’s last 40 years are touched on here: corruption scandals, Mafia involvement, the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro. It’s politics as thriller, or as “a rock opera,” as Sorrentino told the Mirror. Recommended.