Sachs and Malek capture 1980s New York AIDS crisis in 'The Man I Love'

At the Cannes Film Festival, director Ira Sachs and actor Rami Malek have offered the world a quiet reckoning with one of modern history's most devastating silences: the AIDS epidemic that tore through New York in the 1980s. Their film, 'The Man I Love,' does not seek to explain or redeem that era so much as to inhabit it — to restore to the dead and the grieving the particularity of their experience. In a moment when historical trauma is so often processed into spectacle, the film's restraint has drawn critical admiration as a form of moral seriousness.