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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Electric Malady review – life under a blanket for man who fears ‘electrosenstivity’

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This tactful documentary follows William, living in a tinfoil-covered cabin and covered in a blanket. But is there anything behind his condition?

William lives in a pretty wooden cabin deep in a Swedish forest. It looks like any other cabin, except William has covered it with aluminium mosquito netting. Inside, his bedroom is like a silver cave: walls and floor are lined with industrial-looking tinfoil bubble wrap. And then there is William himself – covered from head to toe in a white blanket. He looks like a kid dressed up as a ghost for Halloween. Except there are no cutouts for his eyes: holes would let in the electromagnetic radiation. So William lives mostly in darkness.

This idea that modern life could be making us ill, that there might be health dangers caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields given off by mobile phones and wifi technology, was big in the 00s. The mainstream media took it semi-seriously. Panorama even did a wifi special episode in 2007, which the BBC’s own complaints unit criticised for being misleading. The issue has since dropped off the radar but there are still people who believe that they are suffering from electrosensitivity.

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