Lane approaches her film with the playful, judgment-free curiosity that made previous works like Hail Satan?<\/em> and Nuts!<\/em> so entertaining. The documentary touches on Kenny G\u2019s place in the history of easy listening and smooth jazz, his confusing legacy in the jazz world, and the man\u2019s own beliefs about his art. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out Kenny G doesn\u2019t sweat the haters–after all, he\u2019s got tons of money and a boatload of awards, why should he care? His artistic vision, however, is a little more complicated. His weird blend of genuine artistic passion, competitive nature and corporate sensibility keep shifting throughout the film, and it left me both fascinated and divided on him. I will still, however, keep playing Miracles<\/em> every December. As a child of the 90s, that nostalgia still runs deep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Electrical Life of Louis Wain<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>is another portrait of a popular artist, this one dramatic, and about an illustrator whose work dominated turn-of-the-century England. Louis Wain (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) was a prolific artist whose whimsical pictures of cats were beloved by many, but whose personal life was marked by tragedy and mental illness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Louis is the only male out of a family of six, making him the default patriarch after his father dies. However, he\u2019s completely unsuited to the job, bumbling and following eccentric flights of fancy, much to the frustration of his oldest sister (Andrea Riseborough). He briefly finds happiness with Emily Richardson (Claire Foy), the family\u2019s governess. After she dies, however, his grief and work consume him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Director Will Sharpe combines quirky visuals and wry narration from Olivia Colman with genuine tragedy as he depicts the details of Wain\u2019s life. The aesthetics and little surprises along the way are fun, but once the story takes a sad turn, it becomes unrelentingly bleak; even the movie\u2019s many cute felines don\u2019t help. It\u2019s difficult to parse out what we\u2019re meant to take away from this story, apart from, perhaps, a real-life example of communicating delight in the face of sorrow. Sitting through two hours of said sorrow, however, is a big ask, no matter how cleverly it\u2019s presented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bummer though it is, Louis Wain<\/em> isn\u2019t nearly as maudlin as Theodore Shapiro\u2019s The Starling<\/em><\/strong>, about a couple (Melissa McCarthy and Chris O\u2019Dowd) mourning the death of their infant daughter. Shapiro\u2019s film tries to aim for lighthearted folk wisdom amidst its tale of psychological woe and ultimate growth. Unfortunately, it\u2019s fatally lacking in actual wisdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McCarthy plays Lilly, who holds down a job at a grocery store while grieving the sudden passing of her baby. Her husband Jack (O\u2019Dowd) has been completely incapacitated by the loss, so much so that he\u2019s wound up in a treatment facility. While working in her garden, Lilly gets repeatedly dive-bombed by a nesting starling, and her contentious relationship with the bird somehow facilitates her journey to recovery, along with the intervention of a therapist-turned-veterinarian (Kevin Kline).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Starling<\/em> wants to play its audience\u2019s strings like a fiddle, but frequently mistakes playing for stomping. Shapiro\u2019s tonally bizarre movie veers between depressingly tragic and lightly funny, sometimes within the same scene. It features behavior normal human beings simply do not do, including Kline\u2019s therapist-veterinarian Larry Fine treating the injured bird after McCarthy strikes it with a rock, and McCarthy allowing said creature to recuperate loose in her home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to all this, The Starling<\/em> contains some of the least helpful therapist-patient relationships committed to film. Kline\u2019s character has no real personal insight, and no real arc to speak of, making you wonder what his purpose even is. On that note, Shapiro also makes the strange, expensive choice of using Timothy Olyphant and Daveed Diggs in tiny roles that don\u2019t require their level of skill or charm. It contains no real recommendable qualities, even as an ironic viewing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the flipside, Clio Barnard uses her Ken Loach-esque realist approach to lovely effect in Ali & Ava<\/em><\/strong>, her pseudo-take on Rainer Wener Fassbinder\u2019s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul<\/em>. Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is an affable West Yorkshire landlord whose marriage is on the rocks. Ava (Claire Rushbrook) is a teacher and single mom of five grown kids. The pair meet when Ali helps his tenants drop their daughter off at the school where the slightly older Ava works, instantly bonding over a shared love of music. Their new relationship is challenged by Ava\u2019s clingy son Callum (Shaun Thomas), and Ali\u2019s complicated marital situation and disapproving family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both Ali and Ava are inspired by people Barnard met while working on The Arbor<\/em> and The Selfish Giant<\/em>, and her artistic connection to that region shows in her honest depiction of life there. It\u2019s a loving, warts-and-all portrait, and Akhtar and Rushbrook actively participate as they engage with neighbors, friends, family and each other. Akhtar, who\u2019s probably more recognizable to American audiences in smaller, comedy-adjacent roles (he\u2019s also in Louis Wain<\/em>), particularly shines here, giving Ali subtle interiority and soul. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You Are Not My Mother <\/em><\/strong>is the feature debut of Irish filmmaker Kate Dolan, and displays promise, despite inconsistent pacing. Char (Hazel Doupe) is a smart kid with a difficult home life. Her bipolar mom, Angela (Carolyn Bracken), barely functions, and her occult-dabbling grandmother (Ingrid Craigie) isn\u2019t able to help much. After dropping Char off at school one day, Angela disappears for 48 hours, then mysteriously returns, with a different, vindictive energy. With help from Grandma and new friend Suzanne (Jordanne Jones), Char tries to find out what\u2019s really going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You Are Not My Mother<\/em> contains some effective moments and several excellent shots. However, its gut-punches are few and far between. Bracken\u2019s physicality is excellent, particularly as Angela starts behaving in strange, unsettling new ways, causing us to question whether she\u2019s suffering some supernatural ailment, or if we\u2019re just getting a particularly troubling insight into her mental state. When the movie finally commits to its otherworldly nature, it picks up steam significantly, but overall it feels like a short film stretched to feature length. As a director, Dolan\u2019s got a good eye, but she\u2019s still learning how to effectively structure a longer movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, the unevenness of this year\u2019s TIFF felt like an accurate reflection of where movies are in this baffling, transitional year. If you\u2019re ready to go back to a theater, the goods are there, but even those feel in limited supply. The situation is even more disappointing if you\u2019re still playing it safe and watching new things from home. This year\u2019s festival felt like both a tease of the promise of returning to normal, and the practical bummer that life still actually is while we\u2019re still figuring everything out. More from the Toronto International Film Festival, including mini-reviews of \u2018The Starling,\u2019 \u2018Listening to Kenny G,\u2019 \u2018The Electric Life of Louis Wan,\u2019 and more: <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":577,"featured_media":17154,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419],"class_list":["post-17150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/577"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22181,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17150\/revisions\/22181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/electricallifeoflouiswain_01-1024x512.jpg\")
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