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SUNDAY 26 APRIL
Doors: 2.30pm Film: 3pm The Good Liar (15) There’s embellishing a dating app profile. And then there’s creating an entirely fictitious persona. But for dapper charmer Roy Courtnay (Ian McKellen), a grizzled grifter and veteran conman, lying is a way of life. When he meets well-heeled widow Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren), he settles comfortably into her suburban lifestyle, a world of polite pastels that he privately describes as like being “smothered in beige”. Betty, meanwhile, seems determined to grasp late-life happiness with Roy, despite the reservations of her grandson Steven (Russell Tovey) . Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from a novel by Nicholas Searle, The Good Liar is at its sparky best when Mirren and McKellen are on screen, waltzing smoothly through a plot that feels like a Russian doll of deeper and deeper deceptions. |