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Very well executed

Perfect cast and a good story

The acting in this movie is really good.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Unlike any other bio-film - "Caravaggio" (the fictionalized story of said 16th Century, Italian painter) brings the viewer right into the artist's studio.This film's strengths are in its superb cinematography, its fine cast, and, last, but not least, the marvelous works of Michelangelo Caravaggio, who was nothing short of being a startling genius.Caravaggio, whose art themes centred around sex, death, and redemption, is considered to be the greatest of the post-Renaisance painters.This controversial bio-film explores the artist's life, which was, indeed, very troubled by the extremes of burning passion and artistic radicalism. Here Caravaggio is depicted as a brawler, gambler, and drunkard with bisexual tendencies, who employed street people, harlots and hustlers as his models.Directed by Derek Jarman - "Caravaggio" contains several surprising anachronisms that don't rightly fit into the 16th Century landscape, such as a bar lit with electric lights, a character using an electronic calculator, and the sound of the occasional car honking its horn outside of Caravaggio's studio."Caravaggio" is certainly an intriguing piece of film-making that's sure to be enjoyed by any fan of the avant-garde.

Michelangelo Caravaggio was an important Italian painter who led a short, tumultuous life. He surrounded himself with earthy street people who became the models for his paintings.If you're looking for a biopic about the life of Caravaggio, look elsewhere. This chaotic and bizarre interpretation of his life by avant-garde director Derek Jarman is like seeing art history on a bad acid trip. The story opens well enough around the year 1600, and I thought I was seeing things the first time I saw someone in a 20th century tuxedo. I scratched my head at the calculator, but the motorbike and truck were too much. The use of anachronistic images and odd sound effects (trains, crashing ocean waves) was too jarring and distracting for me. There is little dialogue and the narration was incomprehensible. As a fan of Caravaggio's work, I did enjoy the scenes that showed models posing for his famous paintings, but the rest - a montage of unrelated scenes showing his depraved lifestyle - was just distasteful and speculative. I learned nothing of the man and more about the director.Tilda Swinton made a memorable screen debut in the puzzling role of a young street woman and a very young Sean Bean is interesting as her companion, but Nigel Terry was a confusing and off-putting Caravaggio. Not recommended.

What we know of Caravaggio suggests a strutting brawler with a healthy sense of entitlement who lived amongst whores and thieves and hustlers and put them on canvas. His works' themes were sex, death, redemption, above all, finding the sacred within the profane. He lived at a time where homosexuality carried a death sentence and political intrigue normally involved fatalities in a society defined by the maxim "strangling the boy for the purity of his scream".You can't fault Derek Jarman for his cinematography, nor his recreations of Caravaggio's paintings and you certainly can't accuse the man of shying away from the homosexuality. But frankly, Jarman never strays beyond 80s caricature. Italian patronage becomes the 80s London art scene complete with pretty waiters and calculators. Sean Bean is a sexy bit of Northern rough oiling his motorbike. Tilda Swinton performs a transformation worthy of a Mills and Boons ("Why, Miss Lena, without that gypsy headscarf, you're beautiful..."). Jarman provides Caravaggio with a particularly trite motive for the murder which left him exiled.This could have been a visually stunning treatment of a man whose life was dangerous, exciting, violent and decadent but who nonetheless elevated the lives of ordinary people to the status of Renaissance masterpieces, looked on by Emperors and Kings. Instead, what you get is Pierre et Gilles do Italy. The pretty bodies of young boys are shown to perfection, but never the men who inhabit them. Jarman appears to satirise the London art scene, showing it shallow and pretentious. To use Caravaggio and Renaissance Italy to make the point is to use a silk purse to make a pig's ear. In fairness, this film remains visually stunning, but ultimately as two dimensional as the paintings it describes.

One explanation for the anachronisms in this movie can be a way to stop the viewer from falling into a pure passive state of mind and forcing the mind to think "What's happening?" raising awareness ... and Jarman was a supporter of early TOPY (Temple Ov Psychic Youth) that created Coum Language with this goal. Derek Jarman does an amazing visual transformation with Lena (Tilda Swinton) that really stunned me, it's one of the most beautiful portrays on movies. In my mind the question remains why did Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Thomasoni? Carvaggio's broken heart from what? Was he beginning to love or did he just felt betrayed enough to kill Ranuccio? Maybe Caravaggio did fell in love with Lena's image (that was mostly is own creation).