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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Dabney Coleman obituary

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Prolific actor who, in 1980s films such as 9 to 5 and Tootsie, came to define the misogynistic archetype of a generation

In the 1980 office comedy hit film 9 to 5, Jane Fonda, as one of three long-suffering office workers subjected to endless harassment by their male chauvinist boss, played by Dabney Coleman, eventually gets to call him a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical, bigot”, albeit in her imagination. These epithets could apply to a majority of the many roles played by Coleman, who has died aged 92.

With thinning hair and a fleshy, seemingly friendly face, adorned more often than not with a sly moustache, Coleman made his long career portraying deceptively ordinary, slippery bastards. He played “the man you love to hate” in both dramas and comedies in a similar straight fashion.

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