At WIFF: Amherstburg radio doc a standout

My fave movie so far at the Windsor International Film Festival is Gavin Michael Booth’s Radio Renaissance: Amherstburg’s New Wave, a documentary about the creation of CKBG FM 107.9 in little old Amherstburg.  The doc is a passion project by an A’burg native about the dream and sometimes arduous process of applying for a license for the small-town station, a rarity in this age of media cutbacks and station closings. It was the dream of local radio & TV personality Marty Adler (now sadly deceased) and hit the airwaves in July 2023. Booth’s doc is a comprehensive and well-edited film, interviewing the key radio station players and capturing the town’s ambience, depicted as a friendly closely knit historical place where a radio station can only help enhance community. It’s too bad the film is only being screened once…..Meanwhile I also liked Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother. I’ve long been a Jarmusch fan, one of the key innovators in the post-1970s American independent film movement. The film has three stories focusing in order on Father, Mother and two siblings. The first features a periodic visit by the estranged children to a grizzled rural recluse. The meeting is awkward if friendly but not everything is quite as it seems. The second has two daughters visiting their mum, again on an annual visit and again in a stilted yet stylized setting which evokes some guffaws. The third has a brother and sister ruminating in an empty apartment about their deceased parents. The cast is stellar: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling and Cate Blanchett among others, and there are fine street scenes of Dublin and Paris. The first two stories are the most interesting if only to follow the self-conscious personal interactions but it’s questionable what the stories all add up to…..Next came Colin Farrell in Edward Berger’s (Conclave, 2024) Ballad of a Small Player. The setting is “the gambling capital of the world” Macau China and Farrell plays a Brit expat at the end of his gambling tether. Other than some spectacular scenes of the city’s forest of skyscrapers and gambling dens, and some great editing of our man on the run, the film is really an embarrassment. Every cliché in the book is thrown at the screen, from the disheveled expat (there are numerous sweaty closeups of Farrell’s face which likely will make many a femme swoon) to shambolic hotel rooms, well-groomed crowded baccarat tables and an obvious if distressed love interest. But it’s all formulaic, stylized even, and we can’t possibly care about the character…..Finally, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. Trier, like Jarmusch, is a director whose films I will always catch. The film could be up for some big Oscars. But while good, I found it slow and even plodding (half an hour could have been chopped off the 133 minutes) – just barely keeping my interest – and ultimately is a sappy story, surprising for Trier, about an estranged father and famed movie director (played by the great Stellan Skarsgård) and his actress daughter (Renate Reinsve). Elle Fanning has a star role as an actress both as a character in the film and obviously in the film’s cast.....The 11-day Windsor International Film Festival began Oct. 23 and runs until Nov. 2. Go to https://windsorfilmfestival.com/