Metacritic reviews

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.

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

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.

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.

Less a movie than an act of vandalism.