CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?
resulting from AIDS. “Bohemian Rhapsody” looks at the band but its deepest and darkest core is the tale of Mercury. — Rick Bentley, Tribune News Service R, 106 minutes. Madison Art Cinemas, Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Marielle Heller’s second feature film, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” is an interesting companion piece (and mirror) to her debut, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Both films are adaptations of women’s memoirs, and both carefully inspect the ways in which women navigate and survive with regard to their age and sexuality. As writers, the characters are aware of this, and aware of how they can create their own reality with their words. While “Diary” followed a nubile young ‘70s sex object, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” based on the book by author Lee Israel, adapted for the screen by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, is about an older queer woman, overlooked by society, creating her worth with her words using libertine and actually illegal methods. Lee Israel, played by Melissa McCarthy, is an author in early ‘90s New York struggling to make ends meet. Although she once had a New York Times best-seller, her agent (Jane Curtin) has no interest in her long-gestating Fanny Brice biography and writes Lee off because she’s not a “name” author like Tom Clancy or Nora Ephron. Lee is too prickly and drunk to play well with others, and she finds herself in dire financial straits. When she sells off a personal note from Katharine Hepburn to Anna (Dolly Wells), a friendly bookshop owner and purveyor of rare literary memorabilia, Lee discovers her salvation: forgery. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
FIRST MAN
PG-13, 141 minutes. Through today only at Westbrook. The most captivating sequence in “First Man,” Damien Chazelle’s heart-stirring, nerve-jangling new movie about Neil Armstrong’s voyage to the moon, is in some ways the least surprising. If you were glued to a TV screen on July 20, 1969, you will be watching a truncated version of history replay itself: After the Eagle lands, Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) plants one foot on the lunar surface and utters a line that no screenwriter could improve upon. But you will also find yourself transported anew by a scene whose technical ingenuity and emotional force reminded me of nothing so much as Dorothy opening her front door to Oz for the first time. — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB
1/2 R, 117 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. What can’t Claire Foy do? She’s the Queen of England (on Netflix’s “The Crown”), Mrs. Neil Armstrong (in “First Man”) and for her next trick, she’s slipped into the cyber-goth trappings and jet black bowl cut of the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story.” Her Lisbeth doesn’t have the fierce fragility of Rooney Mara in David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” or the Nordic flintiness of Noomi Rapace, who played the character in the Swedish film trilogy. Foy’s Lisbeth is passionate and compassionate, despite her severe styling and frosty demeanor. Early on, her famed dragon tattoo is sliced open in an attack, and for the rest of the film, despite superglue and staples, it seeps blood. It’s the perfect encapsulation of this Lisbeth Salander, a bleeding heart whose wounds have never closed. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
THE GRINCH
HPG, 90 minutes. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Every Who down in Whoville gets a new Grinch this season. Why, you may ask? The idea defies reason. Does the classic need help from a hot Cumberbatch? Or is this strange union a