Julian Schnabel's 'In the Hand of Dante' Lands on Netflix With a 43% Rotten Tomatoes Score and a Cast That Has No Business Being This Stacked

Julian Schnabel has never been interested in making small movies. The man painted on broken crockery before he picked up a camera, and his films -- Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly -- carry that same go-big-or-go-home energy. So it makes a certain perverse sense that his latest, In the Hand of Dante, would take fifteen years to reach audiences, leak online before its Venice premiere, survive a bruising fight with its own financiers over runtime, and finally land on Netflix with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 43 percent and a cast that reads like someone lost a very high-stakes fantasy draft.

The film opened in select theaters on June 12 before its streaming debut on June 24, according to a report in Deadline. It also screened at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month.

The premise is, to be fair, genuinely wild. Based on Nick Tosches' 2002 novel of the same name, the story follows two parallel timelines: a 21st-century version of Tosches himself, recruited by a mafia don to locate and steal what may be Dante Alighieri's original handwritten manuscript of The Divine Comedy, and Dante in the 14th century, in the thick of writing the thing. As reported by Deadline, Oscar Isaac plays both roles -- Tosches in the modern strand, Dante in the medieval one -- each man "unknowingly connected through time and their obsessive quest for love, beauty, and the divine."

The ensemble around Isaac is, somehow, John Malkovich as the mob boss, Gerard Butler as the assassin along for the ride, Gal Gadot in dual roles across both centuries, and -- and this is real -- Al Pacino, Jason Momoa, and Martin Scorsese, the last of whom actually appears on screen. Benjamin Clementine scored the film. This is either a masterpiece or a catastrophe, and based on everything coming out of Venice last September, it appears to be closer to the latter.

The road to release was not smooth. According to World of Reel, Schnabel had contractually agreed to deliver a two-hour color feature. What he turned in was two and a half hours, partly in black and white. The back-and-forth with financiers took over a year, but Schnabel ultimately got his cut. The version that screened at Venice is the one he intended, uncut. Netflix acquired the film in March 2026, per Deadline's exclusive report at the time.

At Venice, Schnabel received the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award, which is the kind of thing that happens when the industry respects your career even as it struggles with your latest film. Pete Hammond, writing for Deadline, called the screenplay "unpredictable, if uneven" and said the movie "bites off possibly more than it can chew," while still crediting Schnabel for taking a "big swing." FirstShowing was considerably less charitable.

Here is what I find genuinely interesting about this whole situation. Schnabel is one of the few living directors who has earned the right to make a 150-minute crime-meets-medieval-poetry hybrid with an absurdist cast and no apparent interest in mainstream palatability. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly remains a near-perfect film. At Eternity's Gate, his Van Gogh portrait from 2018, was quietly beautiful. His track record says take the swing seriously, even when the result is messy.

And the source material is worth defending. Tosches' novel is a cult object -- brainy, ribald, genuinely strange -- exactly the kind of book that attracts a certain kind of reader who will now have to decide whether the movie version respects what made it special or simply uses its scaffolding to build something else entirely.

Netflix acquiring a divisive, arthouse-adjacent film with no obvious algorithm-friendly hook is itself a story. The Hollywood Reporter's June preview noted that the streamer has been leaning into prestige literary adaptations this year, and this one sits at the far edge of that impulse. Whether subscribers trained on comfort watches will find their way to a black-and-white-inflected meditation on Dante and mortality is a genuine question. But the film exists, it is arriving on the biggest platform in the world, and Schnabel is still swinging. That counts for something.

Sources cited:
- Deadline (https://deadline.com/2026/03/netflix-julian-schnabel-in-the-hand-of-dante-1236760364/)
- Deadline (trailer) (https://deadline.com/2026/05/in-the-hand-of-dante-trailer-oscar-isaac-julian-schnabel-1236928964/)
- World of Reel (https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2026/3/19/julian-schnabels-in-the-hands-of-dante-acquired-by-netflix)
- The Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-june-2026-new-releases-movies-tv-1236610298/)
- FirstShowing.net (https://www.firstshowing.net/2026/netflix-trailer-for-in-the-hand-of-dante-wonky-film-with-oscar-isaac/)
- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hand_of_Dante_(film))