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

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 ...

Spike Lee and Denzel Washington reuniting for Akira Kurosawa remake

The pair, who last worked together on 2006’s Inside Man, will reimagine the 1963 crime drama High and Low for Apple and A24

Spike Lee and Denzel Washington are teaming up for the fifth time, reimagining Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime drama High and Low.

The pair, whose previous projects include Malcolm X and He Got Game, will start filming a reinterpretation in March. Based on the novel King’s Ransom by Ed McBain, the original film stars Toshiro Mifune as a wealthy man in ruin after paying the ransom for a kidnapping.

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