Critics reviews

Derek Jarman’s wittily anachronistic, triumphantly queer gloss on Christopher Marlowe, released in 1991, features Annie Lennox’s rendition of “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and Tilda Swinton as a Margaret Thatcher-like Queen Isabella. So boldly patterned it seems to float in front of the screen like an op art hallucination, it’s showing in a new digital restoration.

My candidate for best movie by the late Derek Jarman is this politically potent, deliberately shocking, anachronistic adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play (1991); Jarman rethinks it in terms of contemporary English homophobia and the Thatcher-Reagan legacy.

Extravagant visual elegance and sexual politics have always formed a volatile mix in the work of the English film maker Derek Jarman. And in "Edward II," the 14th-century tale of the downfall of a weak gay monarch and his unpopular companion is invested with a powerful contemporary resonance.