Caravaggio (re-release)

EMAIL PRINTTwo Boots Pioneer Theater

7.0 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 5 critic reviews
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Based on 2 votes
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Drama

Written by: Derek Jarman

Directed by: Derek Jarman

Release Date:
Theatrical: August 7, 2002

Running Time: 93 minutes, Color

Origin: UK

Summary

RATING: Not Rated

Starring Sean Bean, Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton, Michael Gough, and Robbie Coltrane

Derek Jarman's 1986 film reveals the seventeenth-century painter's complex life?his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and flirtations with the underworld?while also delving into Jarman's major concerns: violence, history, homosexuality, and the relationship between film and painting. (Two Boots Pioneer Theater)

Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Variety Staff (Not credited)

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.

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Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

It's often beautiful to watch, although it's more interested in visual style than philosophical depth.

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TV Guide Staff (Not credited)

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.

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Chicago Reader Pat Graham

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.

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Washington Post Paul Attanasio

Less a movie than an act of vandalism.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Frederick D. gave it a9:
Critics vilified this film. They were wrong. They are so besotted with western linear film plot, they fail to recognize the brilliance of this non-linear portrait of a tormented, but seminal Italian artist as a young man. The film captures his twisted genius, his brutalilty, his passion, his bisexuality, and his transendent vision, which elevated the common poor street beggar to the level of saint and angel. The film captures Caravaggio's genius and psychopathology in equal measure. Though the film takes liberties with time and place, it can hardly being said to be twisting the truth, since so little is known for certain about Caravaggio's life. (See Francine Prose's excellent portrait of Caravaggio in her recet biography -Atlas/HarperCollins books). Jarman imagines well the nightmarish vision of beauty, truth, love, passion and death that drove Caravvaggio's life on the street and on the canvas. The film is similar in approach to Peter Watkins' docudrama about the painter, Edvard Munch, which was also vilified by critics. More recently it was vindicated: the Harvard Film Archive now says the Munch film is "...considered by many to be the most successful portrayal of the artistic process ever depicted on film." I predict a similar future view will emerge of Derek Jarman's film on Caravaggio..

Yoon C. gave it a 5:
Dull or is it befuddling? A muted, slow paced, and enigmatic portrayal of a Renaissance master. Modernist in approach, indecipherable as drama, art critique, or anything else.