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 hell, to ponder the matters of sin, art and the Mephistophelean bargain involved in the attainment of wealth, power and knowledge.

The film unfolds on two narrative levels. In 14th-century Florence, Oscar Isaac plays no less a figure than Dante Alighieri, the great poet whose Divine Comedy virtually invented the concept of redemption, as he grapples with his artistic and spiritual destiny. And in the US in the era of 9/11, Isaac also plays Tosches, louche author and Dante enthusiast, whose aggressive refusal to compromise has alienated publishers and editors, and who now accepts a freelance job via a kid from the old neighbourhood, where the young Tosches had learned to protect himself by any means necessary. John Malkovich plays a mob boss named Joe Black (presumably like the death figure in the movie Meet Joe Black whom Anthony Hopkins meets); he has come into possession of what seems to be the priceless lost original manuscript of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, discovered by an ancient Catholic priest in Sicily with mafia connections.

Gerard Butler returns to keep his family safe from post-apocalyptic chaos in a glum and misjudged follow-up to the superior 2020 adventure

Gerard Butler has made his fair share of sequels, but few have held as much potential as Greenland 2: Migration. The original Greenland wasn’t even a traditional hit; it was released in theaters and on VOD at the end of 2020, when plenty of cinemas remained closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it garnered some attention for being an unusually sober and thoughtful apocalypse movie, especially given that Butler previously starred in the likes of Geostorm. Because Greenland was about surviving a global apocalypse rather than averting one, any sequel would have to venture into the unknown with a drastically different status quo.

Greenland 2 obliges for a little while, though it also walks back some of the hope that ended the first film. The story rejoins engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his administrator wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and their now-teenage son Nathan (recast as Roman Griffin Davis) as residents of a Greenland bunker. They’re lucky to have been government-selected for entry when the Earth was rendered largely uninhabitable by comet fragments five years earlier; they’re also chafing at the loss of freedom, tough decisions and overall claustrophobia that comes with cohabitating underground with hundreds of others. (Curiously, none of them seem to have made many friends despite the close quarters.)