Derek Jarman's apocalypse-now vision of Thatcher's England is a city symphony for the eighties-that is, an anti-city symphony whose lyricism is put toward a portrait of the damage done. An astounding collage of urban images is edited to the nano-second to flow with dramatic passages-reenactments from hell-and idyllic family footage from before the fall. This non-narrative film thus has a dramatic progression to it, even a hero: we meet him shooting up in a godforsaken corner; we see his childhood unfold as if in a dream from another lifetime. Can those backyards where toddlers toddled be the same England of broken windows and useless lives, who creates her own refugees, then rounds them up with terrorist/police? In "flashback" we see Tilda Swinton in gingham, later feverishly cutting up the wedding dress she is sporting. Tempus fugit. The filmmaker is pictured as a sailor/scribe, captured in old-fashioned black-and-white, who "writes" the poetry we hear on the soundtrack: a Burroughs-like plaint made up of rhetorical questions and, for the Thatcher touch, purposely pat answers. ("All's well. No comment.") A beautiful, obsessive, disturbing work, here is Jarman, the craftsman, at his most political-and his most personal.