brutality

In her impeccably researched debut, which opens in 1938, the Canadian author Amita Parikh weaves a hypnotic tale about a circus troupe travelling through Europe on a luxury steam train. Lena Papadopoulos’s father, Theo, is a Greek illusionist with “the showmanship of Houdini, the skill of Devant and the intelligence of Kellar”. He’s the headline act of the World of Wonders circus. Having contracted polio as a baby, Lena uses a wheelchair. She is friendless until a French Jewish boy, Alexandre, is discovered unconscious…

During the Pre-Code era, the New York Legislature had issues with a Pre-Code Horror story drawn by Don Rico in Marvel Tales #97 in 1951. | Marvel is not the first publisher to come to mind when we think of the Pre-Code Horror era of the late 1940s through the early 1950s, but perhaps it should be.  Not only did the publisher enter the horror genre in earnest before EC Comics, but it was also the driving force of the market — publishing around 389 comics that can be considered PCH, vs EC Comics PCH output of about 91 comic…

Credit: Chiara Tesi et al, Wounded to death. Holistic, multimodal reconstruction of the dynamics in a case of multiple perimortem cranial injuries from a medieval site in northern Italy, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103643 A team of researchers from the University of Insubria and the University of Siena, both in Italy, has used modern tools to reconstruct the events that led to…

| Hi folks! Jude Terror here once again with his trusty robot sidekick, LOLtron, bringing you the latest comic book preview from DC. Slam Bradley battles police misconduct in this preview of Gotham City: Year One #3… with his fists. LOLtron, the management here at Bleeding Cool has paired me with you in hopes of "improving the overall tone and quality of my work," so though I know I will regret it, I am contractually obligated to ask: what did you think of the preview of Gotham City: Year One #3? And this time, please……

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Before the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile and Sandra Bland were propelled into the media spotlight, their names were Twitter #hashtags. In 2020, Twitter was essential to the spread of historic Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality across the world. But Elon…

There’s an extra edge to being in a crowd these days. Once we might have asked, will this crowd jostle or crush me? Now we ask, will this crowd make me sick? Will this crowd kill me? As new waves of Covid and new variants keep coming, we wonder: will we ever feel truly comfortable in crowds again?Richard Tognetti, artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, has spent the last few years thinking about crowds. From his home in Sydney, the musician and composer has been working on a new production with director…

An unscrupulous political regime barricades itself behind lies, threats and flexed authoritarian muscle to cover up an incident of police brutality. The backdrop to this meticulously detailed thriller from Jan P Matuszyński is Poland 1983, at the ragged, spiteful tail end of communism. But this story, triggered by cops taking the law into their own hands – hands that are clenched into fists – is not as far removed from the present day as it might be.Matuszyński infuses the film with a nervy, volatile energy from the…

There are flashes of bitter brilliance in this mobster picture from Ukrainian writer-director Oleg Sentsov, whose anti-Putin activism earned him a prison sentence from 2015 to 2019 – only ending after interventions from Amnesty International and the European parliament awarded him the Sakharov prize for human rights. This is strong, fluent, sometimes impassioned film-making, but just as its troubled gangster antihero yearns for meaning in his life beyond violence, so this film appears to be straining for the same…