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A30 PEOPLE & ARTS
Wednesday 11 december 2019
‘The Good Liar’ pairs Mirren and McKellen

By JAKE COYLE hard not think they’re a
Associated Press match made in heaven.
For a blind date, we could And yet “The Good Liar,” a
hardly do better than Hel- modest middlebrow thriller,
en Mirren and Ian McKel- never lives up to the sheer
len. pleasure of seeing its two
They are brought swiftly to- leads together, for the first
gether by a computer dat- time as co-stars. Directed
ing service in the opening by Bill Condon (“Kinsey,”
minutes of “The Good Liar.” “Beauty and the Beast,”
Both click “widowed.” “Dreamgirls”) and adapt-
When they cautiously sit ed from Nicholas Searle’s
down in a quiet London 2016 novel, “The Good
restaurant, and Mirren be- Liar” has the polish that
gins sipping a martini, it’s you would expect from all

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Ian McKellen, left, and Helen Mirren in a
scene from “The Good Liar.”
Associated Press

involved, but little of the champagne. and danger.
sparkle. What unfolds goes con- Roy is a conman. He’s got
Immediately, there’s a siderably further than the a few hustles going on,
play between truth and small exaggerations and but his focus is drawn in-
deceit. When Roy Court- distortions commonly creasingly to getting close
nay (McKellen) is filling out found on Tinder pages. to Betty and robbing her
his dating profile, he se- “The Good Liar” delves of her small fortune, one
lects “non-smoker” while a into deeper falsehoods of amassed from a career as
cigarette smolders nearby. identity and history, teas- a history professor at Ox-
Right after their meeting, ing out a twisty narrative ford. She lives outside Lon-
Roy once out of eyeshot that winds its way back to don, and Roy’s quick inser-
from Mirren’s Betty McLeish World War II. tion into her life (he feigns
quickly sheds his kindly old It aspires to the psycho- a bad limp to score a bed
gentleman persona and logical intrigue of Patricia in her guest room) raises
skips into a nightclub to Highsmith or John Le Carre the suspicions of Betty’s
hash out a scheme with without ever summoning grandson, Steven (Russell
his co-conspirators over such a thick air of mystery Tovey).q

R Kelly charged with paying bribe

before marriage to Aaliyah

TOM HAYS
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Federal
prosecutors are accusing
singer R. Kelly of schem-
ing with others to pay for
a fake ID for an unnamed
female a day before he
married R&B singer Aali-
yah, then 15 years old, in a
secret ceremony in 1994.
The revised indictment
filed Thursday in New York,
accuses Kelly of paying a
bribe in exchange for a This combination photo shows singer R. Kelly after the first day
“fraudulent identification of jury selection in his child pornography trial at the Cook
document” for someone County Criminal Courthouse in Chicago on May 9, 2008, left,
identified only as “Jane the late R&B singer and actress Aaliyah during a photo shoot in
Doe” on Aug. 30, 1994. New York on May 9, 2001.
A day later, Kelly, then 27, Associated Press
married Aaliyah in a se-
cret ceremony arranged cago. her age. Aaliyah died in
by Kelly at a hotel in Chi- The marriage was annulled a plane crash in 2001 at
months later because of age 22.q