Synopsis
A retelling of the life of the celebrated 17th-century Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio through his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and his flirtations with the underworld.
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Cast
- Nigel TerryCaravaggio
- Sean BeanRanuccio
- Garry CooperDavide
- Dexter FletcherYoung Caravaggio
- Spencer LeighJerusaleme
- Tilda SwintonLena
- Nigel DavenportGiustiniani
- Robbie ColtraneScipione Borghese
- Michael GoughCardinal Del Monte
- Noam AlmazBoy Caravaggio
Recommendations
- 80
Variety
Much of the joy of the film is to be found in the way Jarman and his team recreate the look and color of the original paintings. - 75
Christian Science Monitor
It's often beautiful to watch, although it's more interested in visual style than philosophical depth. - 70
TV Guide Magazine
Marrying a painterly aesthetic with a defiantly homosexual sensibility, this ironic biopic is probably the most accessible film of avant-garde British director Derek Jarman. - 50
Chicago Reader
In a sense, Caravaggio has less to do with its ostensible subject than with Jarman's own insistence on sensual, and largely homoerotic, expression, though there's a feeling of stifling enclosure to the images Jarman invents, of eros turned inward, toward private fantasy and longing, rather than outward to a world of real possibility. - 10
Washington Post
Less a movie than an act of vandalism.
