Some movies have everything going for them. An Oscar Isaac double role, Gal Gadot,Gerard Butler, Jason Momoa, Al Pacino, John Malkovich, and even Martin Scorsese pops up. The movie I’m referring to is In the Hand of Dante. The drama is finally on Netflix, and the timing here is rough, because the reviews dropped right alongside it. According to reports the film currently sits at 38% on Rotten Tomatoes. This is based on 26 critic reviews. Although this is not catastrophic, it’s also not the number you want sitting next to a cast list this stacked.
Because the cast really is something. Oscar Isaac leads as a fictionalised version of author Nick Tosches. Tosches, who in 2002 gets pulled into the mafia’s orbit after writing his novel In the Hand of Dante. Now when you add Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Gerard Butler, Gal Gadot, John Malkovich, and Jason Momoa, and Julian Schnabel as the Director. You immediately think, WoW, what an ensemble, right? Surely that’s the kind of lineup that should, in theory, guarantee at least some level of quality. But unfortunately, critics don’t seem nearly as impressed.
The ambitious crime drama adapts Nick Tosches’ acclaimed novel of the same name. Also Oscar Isaac takes on two very different roles. The story spans two timelines roughly 700 years apart. It follows Tosches in the present day and Dante Alighieri himself back in the 14th century. Where he writes The Divine Comedy. Two men, centuries apart, both somehow connected through this obsessive search for beauty, love, and meaning. That discovery sets off a bizarre chain of events. Events, that involve mobsters, murder, religion, art, reincarnation, and enough philosophical conversations to fill an entire university semester. It’s an ambitious premise. There’s no question about that. But the execution is apparently where things go south.
Many critics agree the movie deserves credit for taking a massive swing. The problem is they don’t think it makes the connection. Several reviews praise Schnabel’s visual style and Oscar Isaac’s committed performance. Gerard Butler has also emerged as one of the film’s biggest highlights, with multiple critics calling his performance wildly entertaining. But beyond that, opinions start to unravel, and its first Rotten Tomatoes score suggests this isn’t the masterpiece many hoped it would be.
Critics have described the film as long, confusing and overly ambitious. There are those that argue that it tries to juggle too many ideas at once and bouncing between timelines and genres without ever fully making a connection. Others walked away feeling exhausted rather than rewarded. Which, honestly, might be the most damning kind of criticism you can give a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film. Now let’s be realistic, there is no movie with this run time that is designed to be an easy Friday-night popcorn movie. It asks a lot from its audience, and depending on who you ask, it either rewards that patience or completely loses itself along the way.
What’s interesting is that this isn’t even a consistent number when you look at it holistically . Rotten Tomatoes itself has shown a score shift over time. The movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year in September 2025 and sat at 43%. It then dipped to 34% at one point, and has now settled at 38% as more reviews roll in following the streaming release. These moving scores usually mean that critics are genuinely split rather than uniformly disappointed, which tracks with what’s actually being said about it.
This is also a sharp left turn for Schnabel, whose last film was 2018’s At Eternity’s Gate. A Van Gogh biopic with Willem Dafoe that critics loved and that earned Dafoe a string of Best Actor nominations. Going from that kind of acclaim to this is a pretty significant drop, and not the direction you’d expect from a director with that track record. The film only landed on Netflix yesterday June 24, so there’s still time for audiences to weigh in with their own take, and audience reception doesn’t always line up with critic scores. But if critics are this divided on something this ambitious, it’s hard to feel confident the general public is going to land somewhere wildly different.
Watch The Trailer Here:
We’ll see how the Popcornmeter shapes up over the coming days. For now, this one’s filed under ambitious swing, somewhat missed.
