The Man I Love review – Rami Malek needs a lighter touch in Ira Sachs’ 80s Aids drama

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Cannes film festival: Sachs’ film about an HIV-positive actor in the homophobic Reagan-era 80s is well-intended, but Malek’s mannered performance is hard to love This film from writer-director Ira Sachs gives us premium-strength, undiluted Rami Malek – but I have to say that his overripe performance and self-conscious mannerisms here are perhaps even more oppressively insistent for being conveyed relatively quietly in spoken dialogue. And not quietly at all in the singing scenes. Malek is a performer whose style is as distinctive as those of John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum. But it works best with a light touch in the direction and material. Things never really come together here. The Man I Love is a film about gay culture in 1980s New York, at the height of the reactionary homophobia of Reagan’s America, with HIV-positive men coming to terms with their condition and with the callous bigotry of the political zeitgeist. In one hospital scene, we see the authorities’ icily unsympathetic ...
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Project Wolf Hunting review – Korean horror brings Bruckheimer-esque bombast

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Korea’s most wanted escape their handcuffs on a cargo ship back to the motherland but find they are not alone in bloody thriller

If you had a pound for every slashed jugular and staved-in cranium in this Korean horror-thriller, you would probably have more than the film’s entire budget. This seems to have been mostly spent on supplies of fake blood almost copious enough to run the sprinkler system on Frontier Titan, the 58,000-tonne cargo ship travelling between the Philippines and South Korea in Kim Hong-sun’s film.

Forget Con Air; this is Con Sea, with bruiser cop Seok-woo (Park Ho-san) in charge of escorting a dirty dozen or so fugitives back to the motherland. First among evils is Jong-doo (Seo In-guk), a rapist with boyband looks and tattoos up to his jawline, who earns an early beating from Seok-woo after threatening his daughter. It doesn’t take a doctorate in whup-ass studies to guess that the criminals don’t stay in handcuffs for long. But – unbeknown to all but the doctor who keeps sneaking down to the basement – they are not Frontier Titan’s only cargo. Suffice it to say that transporting this thing on the same ship as Korea’s most wanted is the action-movie equivalent of that meme about the nuclear power plant and the spider farm being next to each other.

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