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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Raging Grace review – scary movie suffers an absence of scares

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An undocumented Filipino cleaner is employed at a vast, remote mansion to care for a bedridden David Hayman, while hiding her daughter Grace

There are interesting ideas – and a tremendous final choir sequence – in this scary movie; it offers a critique of British colonialism, and also plays with the text of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden that urged the United States to assume the thankless imperial task of civilising and subjugating the people of the Philippines, and nobly overlooking how ungrateful they are going to be. There is ingenuity here, and good acting, but the film for me feels flawed by its strained melodrama, an absence of scares and by a very odd scene of almost unreal, farcical absurdity.

Joy (Max Eigenmann) is a Filipino woman in the UK with a young daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla); Joy is doing undocumented work as a cleaner and faces racism and exploitation and imminent expulsion. But then she is employed by the haughty Katherine (Leanne Best) to work in a remote, vast mansion as a housekeeper to Katherine’s bedridden and ailing uncle, Mr Garrett, played with relish by David Hayman. Katherine has no idea about Joy’s daughter and there are some weirdly Feydeau-ish scenes when Joy has to hide the girl and somehow distract Katherine from spotting her.

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