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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Heidi: Rescue of the Lynx review – baby lynx is extra ingredient in new version of classic Alpine yarn

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Also adding an evil land developer to the well-loved children’s story of a kindly girl in the Swiss mountains is ultimately uninspiring

In a picturesque mountain village in the Swiss Alps, a property developer named Schnaittinger is working away to convince the naive local inhabitants that his proposal for a new sawmill is just what they need to get their economy humming. In this inoffensive and ultimately uninspiring children’s animation, peppy little tomboy Heidi realises pretty quickly that this self-styled entrepreneur – sample line: “Machines can help us live a better life” – really only cares about his own profit margins.

Heidi and her friend Peter are given an added incentive to foil the bad guy’s dastardly schemes in the form of an adorable baby lynx that would be imperilled by the development of the area. The lynx is cute in that standard no-brainer kid’s animation way, with big eyes and a stumbling gait guaranteed to tap directly into the “preserve and protect” part of your brain. Unfortunately, watching Heidi unravel Schnaittinger’s evil plot is an exercise in well-intentioned narrative predictability. Various narrative curlicues such as Heidi’s outcast grandfather’s redemption in the eyes of the villagers and Heidi’s pen pal Clara showing up in the third act don’t add much jeopardy to matters.

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