Aarcflick

Servilely tethered to the source material—except where it shouldn't be—Julian Schnabel’s adaptation of *In the Hand of Dante* yields uneven results. While it boasts beautiful cinematography and remains more or less faithful to Nick Tosches’s sprawling, cynical pseudo-biography of Dante Alighieri, the film’s nearly three-hour runtime makes it hard to overlook its pretentiousness and absurdity. One assumes half the cast participated in the project as a tribute to the late, great Nick Tosches. The other half, however, overacts in what plays like a conventional mob movie with intellectual pretensions. Like the book, the story toggles between Dante’s life and the criminal fantasy of an ill-fated writer—named Nick Tosches—who gets entangled in a Mafia plot to authenticate pages from the original *Divine Comedy* manuscript.  Director: Julian Schnabel Writers: Louise Kugelberg, Julian Schnabel, Nick Tosches Stars: Ibrahim Elouahabi, Gavin Weingarten, Al Pacino The literary work is simultan...