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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‘I am elated each time I watch’: why Rushmore is my feelgood movie

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The next in our series of writers drawing attention to their most-watched comfort films is a reminder of Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratic 1998 comedy

“Let’s hope it’s got a happy ending,” Herman Blume, played by Bill Murray in one of his best roles, says near the end of Wes Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore. He makes the remark about an over-the-top, literally pyrotechnic school play that his teenage friend Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) has just debuted to an audience of dazed teachers and parents. But his comment stands in for the whole movie, an audacious and risky comedy that should not work, but does. I am elated each time I watch this poignant, wise and wildly funny film – and, yes, there is a happy ending.

Rushmore is about children trying to act like adults and adults acting like children. Fischer is a precocious scholarship student at Rushmore, a prestigious private boys’ school. He is the sort of bright but naive young person who tries to impress an adult by telling them, with a straight face, that he plans to apply to Oxford and the Sorbonne for university, with Harvard as a “safety.” In fact, Fischer spends more time planning lavish plays and starting school clubs than studying. He is one of the school’s “worst students,” his headmaster (Brian Cox) sighs.

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