The Lesson (2023)

Employed to tutor a teen hoping to enter a prestigious university, a tutor takes up residence in the mansion of a famous writer, finds himself thrust deep into family tensions, and at night is subjected to absurd and untitillating sexual voyeurism in a thriller that grows sillier and sillier as it goes on, featuring Richard E Grant (who I suspect never went home between filming this and Saltburn) and, by far the worst element of the whole silly enterprise, Julie Delpy as the author's wife, who receives good news, bad news, and oral sex, all with the same deadpan expression.

★★☆☆☆

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Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

Even though author Lee Israel's autobiography as it appears here on screen is heavily signposted so that every development is understood long before it comes, Melissa McCarthy as Israel and Richard E Grant as her foppish "An Englishman in New York" criminal aider and abettor Jack Hook turn the slightly belaboured story into a gleefully funny romp about a talented writer driven by circumstance to engage (exceptionally well) in literary forgery.

★★★★☆

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