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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‘Everybody was fondling underwater!’: an oral history of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at 50

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Mick Jagger wanted to play Frank-N-Furter, Susan Sarandon got pneumonia, and the cast were wet and half-naked most of the time. Richard O’Brien, Barry Bostwick, Patricia Quinn and Nell Campbell tell the surprising, seductive story of cinema’s longest-running cult smash

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in cinemas in late 1975 with little fanfare, but the provocative musical, with its campy parody of sci-fi and horror B-movies, fabulous costumes and rollicking songs, dug its glittering heels in and refused to let go for the next 50 years.

The film was an adaptation of the hit musical The Rocky Horror Show, created by Richard O’Brien when he was an unemployed actor. The story of Dr Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), an alien, transvestite scientist, decked out like a bewitching glam rock god and hellbent on seducing everyone around him, galvanised audiences into participating in a way that had never been seen before.

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