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 ...

Walter Mirisch obituary

Producer whose trust in his film-makers led to a string of popular, Oscar-nominated movies

Walter Mirisch, who has died aged 101, was one of the few film producers of the post-Hollywood studio era who had the intuition and the know-how of the old moguls of the 1930s and 40s, combined with the daring and confidence to entrust the movies to the artists themselves.

This resulted in a string of films that gained the approbation of mass audiences and critics alike in the decade following the foundation of the Mirisch Corporation (also known variously as Mirisch Production Company and Mirisch Films), the company set up in 1957 by Walter, his brother Marvin and his half-brother Harold.

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