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

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 ...

Actor Bukky Bakray: the Rocks star hitting the big time

The east Londoner won a Bafta for her performance as the teenage lead in Sarah Gavron’s hit 2019 film. Now, on the eve of three new stage and screen projects, she talks about her whirlwind four years

At 15, Bukky Bakray was in drama class at school in east London, working her way through lines she can no longer remember, when she spotted two unfamiliar figures at the back of the room. “We all thought they were Ofsted inspectors,” she says. “We just ignored them and carried on.”

It turns out they were director Sarah Gavron and casting director Lucy Pardee, who were dropping into schools across London to find young actors for Gavron’s new film, following her star-studded 2015 historical drama Suffragette. Bakray’s presence stood out among the hundreds of students they went on to observe and she was cast in her debut role, as the lead in what would become 2019’s Rocks.

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