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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Bandit review – shallow crime caper is saucer-eyed over real-life 1980s bank robber

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Josh Duhamel charms as ‘flying bandit’ Gilbert Galvan, who pulled off nearly 60 robberies across Canada, but this light-hearted retelling lacks any insight

Bandit is one of those true-crime films where you come away with the impression that the film-makers have spent a bit too long hanging out with their subject, sitting in smoky bars listening to tall tales about the good ol’ bad days. It’s sincere enough but tells an utterly hokey and indulgent story about armed robber Gilbert Galvan, who went on a stick-up spree across Canada in the 1980s, pulling off nearly 60 robberies in three years targeting banks and jewellers. Newspapers called him “the flying bandit”.

The film paints Galvan’s crimes as more or less victimless – repeatedly showing what a polite and cordial bank robber he is, never firing a gun. It’s a glossy old-fashioned movie, mixing a bit of action with tongue-in-cheek comedy. Josh Duhamel gives a performance that’s all charm and no depth as Galvan, a career criminal we first meet escaping from a Michigan prison and hightailing it north of the border. In Ottawa, he changes his name to Robert Whiteman and gets into the armed robbery business, bankrolled by a local criminal hardman (Mel Gibson, about as menacing as a fairy cake).

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