Metacritic score: 86
Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) directs Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, based on Lee Israel’s memoir of the same name. McCarthy plays Israel, a successful celebrity biographer who falls on dire financial straits in the early 1990s and later turns to literary forgery and theft. Richard E. Grant co-stars as her partner in crime, a grifter who’s dealing with his own demons.
The film probes serious matters — loneliness, addiction, illness, and trying to make a living — while also being thoroughly entertaining. It’s a delightfully misanthropic buddy heist that’s both solemn and light on its feet.
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