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To paraphrase Saint Oscar himself, it is absurd to divide films into good or bad; they’re simply either charming or tedious.  Oliver Parker’s latest screen adaptation of England’s greatest wit’s only novel does indeed poisonously charm, by running wild – if not Wilde – with its inspiration’s fatally bewitching tale of the beautiful and the damned.

Firstly, the movie strikes a very en vogue pose: in our metrosexual age of male self-adoration, Dorian’s Faustian pact, promising eternal youth at the expense of a degenerating soul, reflects masculinity’s fatally alluring – and enduring – romance with its own mirror image.  (Blame Team Beckham or the feminist wet dream?)

Furthermore, Parker’s revision is merely the newborn in a succession of dandyish bastard children spawned from the original: in an act of ultra-modern, homo-cloning, we’ve caroused with Will Self’s diseased, scurrilous imitation; Hollywood and BBC screen versions; and even Matthew Bourne’s ballet, in which Dorian, as the beautiful boy-as-destroyer, is transplanted to the haute couture fast-lane of modern fashion – an extended D&G underwear campaign juicily bursting with Nureyevan gestures and bulging crotches.

Re-located to the virtue and vice of Victorian London, Ben Barnes leads as the icily remote, self-possessed Dorian, his dark good looks making him perfectly (mal)adjusted for his trajectory of debauched downward mobility.  Predictably, co-star Colin Firth uncannily captures the cynicism and jaded hedonism of Lord Henry, firing out brittle epigrams with a crystalline spikiness as he whisks his pouting protégé through an underworld of gin dens and whorehouses: ‘Most people are mugged by a creeping common sense.  They don’t realise until too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes’.

Invariably, Wilde’s original is vulgarised and left gimpishly subjugated to the ever-swelling demands of splashy, big budget CGI – as with Dorian’s putrid, snorting portrait.  Whether it was Parker’s cruel intention or not, the film quickly sinks into campy, panto-horror-drenched Gothica, with juxtaposed cuts between twee tea parties and heavy-duty S&M orgies, falling somewhere between Russ Meyer and a Herschell Gordon Lewis B-movie.

Yet, in its quest to prove that life doesn’t imitate art, but is destroyed by it, it is perhaps depressingly logical that Wilde’s vision has been cosily domesticated by tacked-on PC apologia, dumbly explaining away wanton immoralism and decadent excess.  With scenes of Dorian’s child abuse and gay sex (rather than seductive homoeroticism), we are given the glib, socially acceptable Oscar that is the cheap product of a very modern makeover.

But safely sordid as Dorian Gray may be, it wouldn’t be surprising if its author is still smirking spitefully from the Great Library in the sky.

While many 80s pop stars have watched their heyday fade disgracefully, sagging into middle age by cosily treading the nostalgia circuit and National Lottery appearances, Marc Almond has stubbornly avoided the glitzy showbiz graveyard for a more quixotic, vital musical underworld.

The former Soft Cell frontman, who once scandalised Top of the Pops with his mascara-smeared, pallidly androgynous appearances – never one to shy away from doing the nasty by corrupting a generation with his sneering, sleazy electro-pop eargasms (‘Tainted Love’, ‘Sex Dwarf’) – has matured from sordid pop pervert to decadent chanteur.

His penchant for an aesthetic pitched somewhere between the sublimity of high camp (duets with Gene Pitney; Pierre et Gilles posterboy) and perverse melancholia (duets with Nico; plundering Jacques Brel’s back catalogue; Genet jailbird posturing) has garnered him acclaim as a ‘serious’ theatrical interpreter – a tortured torch balladeer in the mould of Marlene Dietrich (if she hailed from Southport).

Almond’s latest album, mythically titled Orpheus In Exile, sees him embark on a passionate, despairing love affair with Vadim Kozin’s venerable songbook – the Eastern Bloc’s very own Orpheus and major star of traditional Gypsy Folk and Russian torch song Romances.  Providing the sequinned backdrop to Stalin’s Iron Curtain as a kind of Soviet Vera Lynn wartime entertainer, Kozin’s flamboyantly defiant homosexuality and subversive individualism led to his exile in the 1950s, spending the rest of his life in and out of brutal Siberian labour camps until his death in 1994.

Almond’s soaring, aching voice is the perfect instrument to pay jubilant homage to this most venerated of outsider artists, from the mournful, plaintive balladry of ‘A Skein of White Cranes’ or ‘Letter From Magadan’, to the raucously bawdy folk of ‘Brave Boy’ (Kozin’s lusty paean to a Red Army soldier) and galloping, up-tempo sing-along ‘Friendship’.

With its lush orchestration courtesy of the Orchestra Rossiya and Alexei Fedorov’s elegant arrangements, Orpheus In Exile immerses itself in the full register of human emotion – from elation to despair, triumph to defeat, agony and ecstasy: both a heartfelt ode to this marginalised voice, and Almond’s own majestic swansong, proving that he can still find the grit amidst the washed-up pearl of pop.