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 Fantastic Four: First Steps review – Marvel regains buoyancy with wacky superhero family sitcom

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In a retro-futurist version of early 1960s New York, Mr Fantastic and Sue Storm are living together as a dysfunctional family with the Human Torch and the Thing – with a baby on the way

Baby steps, in fact. Marvel has rediscovered the lighthearted dimension of superheroism, the buoyant fun and the primary colour comedy – as opposed to the wiseacre supercool of, say, Guardians of the Galaxy. Here it has amusingly brought back the Fantastic Four in their early years (but not to the very beginning) in a retro-futurist version of early 1960s New York where no one smokes. Hilariously, the Four are of course living together as a family in a bizarre hi-tech apartment, like something in TV’s Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, often wearing their comfy blue pyjama-style outfits.

Scientist Dr Reed “Mr Fantastic” Richards, whose nickname rather oversells his peculiar superpower of stretchiness, is played by Pedro Pascal in a lighter vocal register than usual; he’s married to Sue “Invisible Woman” Storm – played by Vanessa Kirby. They are basically mom and dad to a couple of guys who are to all intents and purposes teen boys: Sue’s brother Johnny “Human Torch” Storm (played by Joseph Quinn) and superstrong Ben Grimm played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. They are essentially two grown men who live with Reed and Sue in a cheerfully infantilised state, and what complicates things is that Sue is now suddenly pregnant long after the couple had given up hoping. (There is apparently no IVF in this alt-reality universe.)

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