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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The Banished review – cultish terrors lurk in the Australian outback

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The folk-horror wave opens an Aussie branch in this shrewdly splintered tale of a city girl returning to her roots where chthonic menace awaits

Weirdos in animal masks, summary executions, rituals that envelop you in a strange sense of predestination; thanks to the folk-horror crowd, you can’t go for a country walk these days without expecting to stumble into some uncanny pagan savagery. This Australian thriller subscribes unquestioningly to all of the above tropes, but its delicately splintered narrative and feel for outback disorientation and dismay mark out a distinctive trail – until it disintegrates to the point the film can only turn in circles.

Prodigal city girl Grace (Meg Eloise-Clarke) comes back to her home town in the bush to search for her missing brother David (Gautier de Fontaine), who saved her from their abusive father. Nosing around this depressing outpost, she hears rumours of a mysterious commune out in the wilderness drawing in local vagrants and drifters. Her uncle (Tony Hughes) warns her off investigating – but of course she ignores him, as well as the pile of keepsakes hinting at her family’s long involvement in cultist shenanigans. So she slings a few grand to her shady former geography teacher Mr Green (Leighton Cardno) to escort her out into the scrub.

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