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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Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker review – ups and downs of a tennis legend

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Alex Gibney’s documentary about the disgraced German tennis star has wonderful archive footage and interviews but is ultimately unrevealing about its subject

Despite some great archive material and nice interview turns, this documentary portrait of disgraced German tennis legend Boris Becker from film-maker Alex Gibney is a frustrating and disappointing experience – because of the baffling way it is structured, both unrevealing and anticlimactic. It starts at the end, swoops back to the beginning and finally grinds to a halt somewhere around the middle. It could be that this is intended to be merely a first “episode”, though it isn’t billed as such.

We commence with Becker’s gripping downfall for tax evasion at London’s Southwark crown court in 2022, facing two-and-a-half years in prison and powerful interview testimony from the man himself: rueful, haunted, but rejecting self-pity. (In fact, Gibney seems to have had two interview sessions with him, one just before the verdict and one two years before that.) Then we cut back to his stunning 1985 Wimbledon triumph at the age of just 17, and his face is eerily cherubic.

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