Review: Melissa McCarthy in `Can You Ever Forgive Me?`
(WorldNews Entertainment)

The early 1990s New York of Marielle Heller`s `Can You Ever Forgive Me?` isn`t so long ago but it already feels staggeringly distant. It`s a New York of publishing industry cocktail parties, of book stores, lots of them, and of scheming, foul-mouthed eccentrics. Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) and her partner-in-crime Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) are two such dyed-in-Zabar`s characters. Life has been kind to neither of them. Israel`s latest book, a biography of Estee Lauder, lies stacked on the 75 percent-off table. When she runs into her old friend at a bar (it`s still daylight outside but both are well on their way), Lee asks Jack, a former actor, what he`s been doing with his life....