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 ...

‘For me, she had the Jewish chops to play Golda’: director of Golda Meir film addresses casting Helen Mirren

Guy Nattiv defends choosing actor to play the former Israeli prime minister in a new biopic, amid debate about 'authentic casting’

Helen Mirren ducked a question at the Berlin film festival as to whether it had been appropriate to cast her as former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a feature drama during a promotion event ahead of the film’s world premiere.

Having faced criticism for taking on the role amid a debate about authentic casting, with leading British Jews such as Maureen Lipman and David Baddiel suggesting Jewish roles should be reserved for Jewish actors, Mirren turned to her director, Guy Nattiv, to respond to the question from The Guardian.

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