Critic Reviews

The result is unlike any movie you’ll see and listen to this summer, a grand overeach with indulgences that will make you grimace even as they give you access to the fertile creative mind of poets, painters, actors and a filmmaker who gets it even if he sometimes struggles to help us get it with him.

Ironically, the film is too concerned with the abstract business of genius to give enough space to the gifted folks on screen.

The combustible mix of lowlife cynicism and high art provide enough energy and enjoyment to power the first two-thirds of this long film. But in the end it flags, and it’s as if the outrageous black comedy has to be paid for with solemn romantic fantasy. But what a performance from Butler.

While “In the Hand of Dante” never finds the consistency that eludes it, it is a film that sparks in individual beats.

The film may be unbridled, unfettered and bold, but sometimes those adjectives aren’t complimentary.

Part modern mob movie, part period biopic, the star-studded In the Hand of Dante has big ideas that completely fail to cohere.

Nothing can stop this overlong and disastrously ill-judged project from flying off the rails.

Anyone expecting a fast-paced corker full of secret codes, hidden compartments, and chases down rain-slicked cobblestone streets, however, will be disappointed.

Dante’s major work included “Inferno,” where he described nine circles of hell. An eternity spent in any of them would be more enjoyable than this heavy-handed hot mess.

The film director creates the sensation for viewers of being dragged through the various levels of hell across the course of 2.5 turgid hours, riddled with incomprehensible dialogue, baffling accents and some of the most egregious continuity in recent film history.