Director Derek Jarman's controversial adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's play portrays the weak-willed monarch as neglecting his kingdom for his commoner male lover.
The horrors of war and the pacifist sentiments expressed in Benjamin Britten's War requiem and the poems of Wilfred Owen are evoked in scenes and vignettes illustrating death and suffering in World War I.
Jarman's gorgeously sensual re-imagining of the volatile life of the 17th-century painter through his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and his rampant flirtations with the underworld.