Derek.

"Derek, a fragmentary portrait of the British filmmaker, painter, set designer and writer Derek Jarman, is a cinematic scrapbook of the life and times of an iconoclast, aesthete and provocateur who died of AIDS in 1994," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Assembled by the director Isaac Julien, the fragments are clustered around a poetic epistle, 'Letter to an Angel,' written by Mr Jarman's friend Tilda Swinton and published in the Guardian in 2002."

Updated through 6/12.

"But where angels go, trouble follows," warns Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York. "On the page, Swinton's elegy is moving; hearing her deliver phrases like 'but our souls droop without the bittersweet touch of something we might recognize,' the effect is fruity and turgid."

At MoMA, from today through Monday.

The series Of Angels and Apocalypse: The Cinema of Derek Jarman runs at the nwFilmCenter in Portland from July 11 through 31.

Earlier: Brian Darr and others from Sundance; Dennis Lim in the NYT.

Update: For Artforum, Brian Sholis sketches an overview of the life, then adds, "Julien's film, more homage than full biographical study, is an affected yet affecting collage, sure to help stave off, if only for a short while, the narrator's assertion near the end of Blue: 'In time, / No one will remember our work / Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud.'"

Update, 6/10: Slant's Ed Gonzalez finds it a "shame" that "Julien, whose previous multimedia tributes to Jarman have imaginatively overlapped the man's experimentalism with his personality, here presents his story with such generic linearity. Derek is a sincere and succinct snapshot, though its singular subject might have taken issue with its stylistic conventionality."

Update, 6/12: Armond White in the New York Press on Derek and Chris & Don: "These gay documentaries show more loving than today's gay film fiction."

Posted by dwhudson at June 9, 2008 8:31 AM