In the Hand of Dante review – Gerard Butler is jaw-dropping in bizarre Renaissance mafia reverie

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Julian Schnabel’s combustible mix of lowlife cynicism and high art – along with cameos from Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino – powers this outrageous black comedy revolving around Dante’s Divine Comedy The worlds of Renaissance manuscript scholarship and organised crime come together like a mix of Umberto Eco and George V Higgins in this flawed but fascinating reverie from director and co-writer Julian Schnabel. Switching between monochrome and colour, and freely adapted from the Nick Tosches novel of the same name, it is hilarious and shocking, at least at first, with a quite extraordinary tough-guy role for Gerard Butler. It is a mysterious, scabrous and bizarre adventure in violent larceny and spiritual crisis which unfortunately unwinds in the end into sentimental fantasy. In the Hand of Dante amounts to an epic and self-aware jeu d’ésprit with amazing cameos from Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino and Franco Nero, beckoning its audience over to peep into the fathomless abyss of heaven and ...
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Renegades review – veteran musclemen team up for ‘geri-action’ caper

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Nick Moran and Lee ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ Majors are the star names in this UK thriller, but they are let down by inept action sequences and stilted banter

Cheap as undercooked chips, this British thriller about elderly ex-soldiers avenging a friend’s death belatedly cashes in on the 2010s trend for “geri-action” films, to borrow a term coined by Vulture’s Matt Patches. Though less slick, it resembles those American fisticuff- and gunfire-packed thrillers (the Red and Expendables franchises, for example) built around former big-name actors supplementing their pension schemes.

Directed by Daniel Zirilli, the film features Nick Moran (still best known for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) as the low-profile protagonist, Burton, a former SAS man suffering from PTSD. He gets scooped up on the street by an old acquaintance, American veteran Carver (former Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors), who has a beef with some gangsters in his London neighbourhood who are trafficking women, selling drugs and, given the age of everyone here, possibly dealing in black market ration cards.

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