Edward II

Christopher Marlowe's 16th century play is radically adapted by Derek Jarman in one of his most powerful films, starring Tilda Swinton.

King Edward II rejects his cold wife Queen Isabella and takes a male lover, the commoner Piers Gaveston upon whom he bestows gifts and power. The king's behaviour enrages the sober, business-suited court officials and the spurned queen becomes a seething monster whose dresses and jewellery grow more outrageously lavish as her need to vengeance escalates and the plotting begins.

Using anachronistic imagery, modern dress, gay activists battling riot police and Annie Lennox singing Cole Porter, the story of Britain's only openly gay monarch and the persecution he suffered is given resonance by Derek Jarman, paralleling the injustice with modern-day homophobia. As well being as a subversive historical adaptation, Jarman's film was also cited as one of the key films of the New Queer Cinema wave in the early 1990s, alongside My Own Private Idaho, Young Soul Rebels and Poison (all 1991).