Caravaggio

Caravaggio (1986) is Derek Jarman's biographical drama, available to watch online on iFILM. As he lies dying, the Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi runs back through his life — the hungry beginnings, the patrons, the obsessions that nearly damned him.

Jarman skips the tidy life story. He assembles the painter out of fragments: tavern brawls, commissions from cardinals, models dragged in off the streets of Rome. Caravaggio gives his saints the faces of thieves and prostitutes, falls for his model Ranuccio, and slides into a love triangle that turns lethal. Nigel Terry plays him as a man who picks up a brush and a knife with the same hand.

Known for its deliberate anachronisms — a typewriter here, a pocket calculator there — the film hauls the seventeenth century into Jarman's own present. It marks Tilda Swinton's screen debut, with early turns from Sean Bean and Robbie Coltrane. Slow, sensual and unmistakably art-house, it rewards anyone who wants a painter's inner life over a costume-drama highlight reel. Stream Caravaggio (1986) online on iFILM.