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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Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema

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The late actor was a commanding and versatile presence on the big screen, perfecting everything from villainy to sensuality in films such as Don’t Look Now and Klute

Donald Sutherland was an utterly unique actor and irreplacable star: possessed of a distinctive leonine handsomeness that the white beard of his latter years only made more majestic: watchful, cerebral, charismatic, with a refinement to his screen acting technique comparable perhaps only to Paul Scofield and his Canadian background (together with his early stage training and experience in England and Scotland) gave his American roles a certain touch of Anglo-international class. Sutherland was commanding and exacting, he gave each of his roles and films something special: he addressed his co-stars and the camera itself from a position of strength.

Even playing a weak or absurd character, as he did starring as the preposterous womaniser in Federico Fellini’s Casanova in 1976, finally reduced to the job of a librarian in a German count’s castle, brooding grotesquely over the phantoms of past lovers, Sutherland was still strong, still mesmeric, his intelligent face still sympathetic as Casanova, even though resembling a non-priapic gargoyle. For Bertolucci in his Italian epic 1900, he played an actual fascist, the gruesomely named Attila, and though certainly very far from sympathetic, he played the role with a sickeningly twinkle-eyed dynamism.

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