subversive

The ending of Denis Villeneuve’s first Dune film made it possible to read this telling of Frank Herbert’s opus as a grim but optimistically opened narrative about a young man embracing destiny to become a liberator. The film framed Paul Atreides’ wisdom as his most invaluable tool, and it presented his moral clarity as a sign of his walking a righteous path. As in the book, you were meant to see Paul as a complicated but sympathetic figure at the beginning of his Shakespearean hero’s journey. But Dune: Part Two lays bare…

Sumptuous, sensual and impossibly handsome, at first glance French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s lavish foodie romance The Taste of Things looks like just another decorous prestige period drama. But in its elegantly restrained way, Tran’s film, which is set almost entirely in the kitchen, grounds and dining room of the country chateau of famed gourmet Dodin (Benoît Magimel) in 1880s France, is every bit as radical and risk-taking as some of the showier, quirkier awards contenders this year (it was France’s…

It’s tough to sell a decades-old doll and actively make you question why you’d still buy a toy that comes with so much baggage. (Metaphorically speaking, of course — literal baggage sold separately.) The makers of Barbie know this. They know that you know that it’s an attempt by Mattel to turn their flagship blonde bombshell into a bona fide intellectual property, coming to a multiplex near you courtesy of Warner Bros. And they’re also well aware that the announcement that Greta Gerwig would be co-writing and directing…

Tessa Hadley presents everything as fine at the front while it comes apart comprehensively at the back. The dozen short stories that comprise After the Funeral, her absorbing and thoroughly readable fourth collection, manage with a quiet dexterity the emotional situations that promote this kind of undoing.Lynette, central character of Dido’s Lament, bumps into – or is bumped into by – Toby, her ex of many years. The collision, and what they make of it, will maintain a certain ambivalence. Who actually bumped into whom?…

Baltimore is the “Town Without Pity” of Gene Pitney’s song in John Waters’ classic 1988 high-camp bubble-gum musical comedy now on re-release, about a youth TV pop show of the early 60s whose executives are resisting integration and black music even as their teen fans demand it. It’s a film that satirises racism and body-conformism, and 35 years on, it looks more than ever like a left-field riposte – part critical, part supportive – to the extravagant nostalgia of Grease, American Graffiti and TV’s Happy Days.Hairspray…

The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a visual novel that ties together nine (don’t ask) Japanese folktales, spirits, curses and, well, ukiyoe block prints. You’ll hop between several protagonists, trying to figure out who’s holding magical killer trinkets and who’s trying to collect them all from reviving the dead. It’s the usual visual novel style of play: you talk to people, click on interesting things in the background, try to choose the right dialogue options, fail and try again. Paranormasight uses 360-degree environments…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Skateboarding continues to be unkempt, subversive and tacitly political despite inclusion in mainstream competitions like the Olympics, experts have said. The "discordance" between skateboarding's ethos and capitalism raises questions about its continued incorporation into competitive sports, a new…

| Mark Russell is the consistent satirist in mainstream comics right now, and Traveling to Mars turns his jaundiced eye on space travel in a bleakly funny subversion of the genre. Space travel is founded on optimism, the model established by editor John W. Campbell where capable white men go to space for the betterment of Mankind. Russell turns that completely on its head. "Traveling to Mars" cover, ABLAZE It's not-too-far future. Roy Livingston is a nobody of nothing of note to his life, and he's traveling to Mars. He…

I had two Angelas in my life at one stage. Angela Carter (long gone and greatly missed) and Angela Lansbury (flew out of this world last night, equally greatly missed). There should be a ghost at your elbow, whose only purpose is to remind you how lucky you are.I would travel over to Clapham Common in south London to work with the first Angela, dissecting her short story collection The Bloody Chamber into interlocking bites and fragments of upended fairy tales that would become The Company of Wolves. I ended up with the…

In Other Ever Afters, Melanie Gillman’s new graphic novel collection of fairy tales, queer people find happiness, community, and kindness. It feels almost revolutionary, updating fairy tales’ traditional mores, using fantasy and folklore as a space to imagine something better than the familiar good-versus-evil binary that often defines fairy tales as we know them today. Beautifully illustrated and wholly unique, Other Ever Afters feels like a heartfelt yet funny antidote to the usual straight, whitewashed happily ever…