Derek Jarman delves into the homoerotic subtext of Caravaggio’s paintings as well as muses on the possible romantic entanglement with one of his models and the model’s wife, in a movie that competes with the original paintings for visual splendor with superb production design. It also contains a calculated anachronistic quality that collapses past and present (electronics, magazines, and cars appearing to distort the mythic quality of the historical context, applying its same visual representations to today). And Sean Bean dies again.

–DB