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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Hold Your Breath review – Sarah Paulson gets lost in scattered horror

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A 1930s-set thriller, about a family battling mysterious dust storms and a possible intruder, is impressively made and acted but falls apart by the end

An award-winning actor playing a fiercely, even frighteningly, protective mother guarding her two children from an unspecified malevolence in a remote home. No, I’m not talking about last month’s Halle Berry horror Never Let Go (is anyone still talking about that one?), but rather this month’s Sarah Paulson horror Hold Your Breath, a film that carries surface similarities (as well as a hopelessly generic rollercoaster-warning-esque title). Like that film, it plays with recent genre trends – a remote, pandemic-suited location and the corrosive effect of mental illness – as well as the use of a life-saving rope tied to the home for those who need to leave. And like that film, it’s also a bit of a mess.

Originally titled Dust, originally set to star Claire Foy and originally intended for a theatrical release, the film arrives at the beginning of Hulu’s month of genre fare, dubbed Huluween. It’s far classier than that categorisation would suggest (especially when compared with films like cheapo evil pumpkin horror Carved), a handsomely made 1930s-set thriller that, unlike most streaming offerings today, also looks like it could stretch to a cinema screen. Added class also comes from Paulson, one of the most reliable small-screen and stage actors we have, who hasn’t really had enough big-screen chances at least not as lead. While Hold Your Breath isn’t quite able to keep up with her, it’s at least a deserving and all-consuming showcase, the actor exhaustively giving it her all.

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