KimberleyNixon Tagged Articles at Cinematical

A highbrow festival like Toronto doesn't offer many opportunities to laugh, and I was grateful for this one. Easy Virtue, an adaptation of an early Noël Coward play, is a droll and witty delight, a superb showcase for its cast, and a return to fine form for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert director Stephan Elliott, who last turned in the unsettling but incomprehensible Eye of the Beholder nearly 10 years ago. Where most TIFF films seemed to glower at me from the screen, this one winked and smiled.

Noël Coward may seem a strange choice for Elliott, whose films have favored the bizarre and the obscure. I don't know what attracted the filmmaker to this project, but I'm glad that something did. The material may seem almost purely verbal, all clever turns of phrase and sardonic interjections (what Americans think of as "Britishness"), but Elliott is constantly concerned with how the movie looks and sounds. Fittingly, he manages to give it a curious, otherworldly feel. This is most pronounced in the opening sequence, which marries choppy black-and-white footage, odd angles, and a jazzy soundtrack to introduce us to the characters and transport us to a universe that is ever so slightly off-kilter. It's a welcome recognition that these hyper-literate, impeccably constructed old comedies – Coward, Wilde, etc. – don't take place in a world quite like ours.

Harry Potter has got to end sometime, and by "sometime" I mean in less than three years when the second cinematic half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sees release. And some people would like to still have a career when that happens, thank you very much. To that end, Rupert Grint -- a.k.a. Ron Weasley -- has taken a role in an indie film called Cherry Bomb, which sounds about as far from Harry Potter as you can get without developing an erotic fixation on horses.

The film, written by acclaimed playwright Daragh Caville, focuses on three teens who set out for a wild weekend of drugs, sex and crime only to see it escalate into something far more serious than they imagined. It co-stars relative unknowns Robert Sheehan and Kimberley Nixon, and is set for release next year.

While Daniel Radcliffe has tried more extreme methods of branching out (mainly by taking that infamous role in Equus, which is coming to Broadway per the above link) and Emma Watson hasn't done very much at all (she voices a character in this year's The Tale of Despereaux, but that seems to be it), Grint has spent what spare time he has toiling away in indieville. Cherry Bomb was preceded by the reasonably well-received and much less racy Driving Lessons, about a troubled boy's friendship with a retired actress.