• Can You Ever Forgive Me?

    Chin chin! A half-cut treat to see off a dry January, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is an immensely enjoyable and assured tragi-comic memoir, Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant in a spirited double act as a pair of grifting boozehounds in early 90’s New York. McCarthy has made her name playing loud, sweary and angry, but beneath her characters’ luridly detailed, improv-style threats of violence there is usually a blinking pilot light of sadness, marking women who feel beaten down, ignored and overlooked. The puppy-nabbing outsider in Bridesmaids; the minimum-wage worker in Tammy; the aggrieved middle-aged woman ditched by her husband in…

  • Life of the Party

    Life of The Party is a comedy about the danger of compromising for your partner. Melissa McCarthy plays the homely, mumsy Deanna, whose husband Dan announces he’s filing for divorce just after they drop their daughter off for her first college semester. Feeling sucker-punched and bereft, she decides to enrol in the college herself and finish the archaeology degree she abandoned when she got pregnant. Dan (Veep’s Matt Walsh) is shacking up with a glamorous realtor (Modern Family’s Julie Bowen), leaving Deanna bitter at having put him first all her life and having little to show for it. The message…