EDWARD II

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, his adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's musty Elizabethan drama, the 14th-century tale of the downfall of a weak gay monarch and his unpopular companion, is invested with a powerful contemporary resonance.
Although the screen adaptation remains faithful to Marlowe's text, Jarman has augmented the drama with provocative visualizations of homosexual love and the persecution of gay people that infuse the play with sex, sadomasochistic violence and a hysterically pitched moral fury. Where the play is a dog-eat-dog political allegory without heroes, the movie is a tract against the oppression of homosexuals through the ages.
Edward II was shot among giant stone blocks placed in sand, and this setting gives the film a look that seems more North African than English. In a strong cast, Tilda Swinton, who plays Edward's Queen, Isabella, turns in the most memorable performance, that of a love-starved woman whose iceberg exterior conceals a consuming sexual hunger. (Stephen Holden, \"New York Times\", 1992)