In the Hand of Dante

A Vatican priest turns up what may be the original manuscript of the Divine Comedy, and the writer brought in to authenticate it decides instead to steal it. Running alongside is Dante himself, laboring toward the masterpiece that centuries later becomes the object everyone is willing to ruin themselves over. That double structure — a modern crime of literary greed braided with a medieval act of creation — supplies both the ambition and the heft, and at two and a half hours the film plainly intends to take its time.

Patient viewers drawn to literary obsession, relics and the murky trade in sacred objects will find the most here. It is dense, talky and far more interested in the weight of a text than in thriller mechanics, and the period passages ask you to hold two eras in your head at once. If you enjoy big swings that risk pretension for the sake of an idea, it rewards the sit. Anyone hoping for a lean heist, or for something that moves at pace, should look somewhere else entirely.