The best pop culture pictures of the month

This still from Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel has a varnished exoticism that harks back to colonialist fantasies: 19th-century paintings such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s icky orientalist confection The Snake Charmer, where a fat python suggestively wreathes a nude boy. Photograph: PR

Peter Jackson’s Gollum is a wheedling addict. He’s also got a menacing streak, like the crouching incubus patiently perched on the chest of the sleeping beauty in Fuseli’s Gothic masterpiece, The Nightmare. Photograph: Warner

The floating creatures Björk summons in the video for Mutual Core are close cousins of the giant dragon puppets paraded at Chinese New Year. They also resemble Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou’s sculptures, where tribal totems are built from layers of junk. Photograph: PR

Included in the current retrospective at Somerset House, Lorenzo Agius’s portrait of the great Italian designer has the floaty unreality of a surrealist dreamscape. As with the heads and hands that litter Dalí’s empty deserts, the marble bust and foot in Agius’s shot are antiquity as Freudian fetish. Photograph: PR

His drawing is one of many works in progress packed into a new Thames & Hudson tome, Comics Sketchbooks. The constructivist poster style, with its shouty slogans, sharp angles and thrusting machines, harks back to Rodchenko and post-revolution Russia. Photograph: Rian Hughes