It’s taken Avril Lavigne more than a decade to release a self-titled album, but in some ways it’s appropriate: after all, the Canadian singer’s best music still sounds exactly like what she was releasing as a teenager. The difference is that when she first burst onto the scene, all sweatbands and heavy eyeliner, Lavigne was a breath of fresh air - but now, on her new album, she seems to be taking her cues from the women she blazed the trail for.

There are few more beautiful places in the world to make music than Banff, the arts community founded in 1933, originally to teach drama. From small beginnings it became a name uttered with a certain reverence among the music world. And that is still true today, despite the fact that the centre is now as populated by conference attendees and "leaders of the future" as musicians, dancers, writers and artists.

Carey Marx, Gilded Balloon ****

Carey Marx couldn't come to the Fringe last year, because of the small matter of having a heart attack. But, looking on the bright side, the experience has given him his new show, Intensive Carey, in which the comic tells his story without a trace of self-pity and with a keen sense of the absurd.

Schoolchildren drowning under a frozen lake in their crashed bus is the image most people still associate with Atom Egoyan. The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which pivots on that scene (the ill-fated bus is pictured below), gained him Oscar nominations as director and screenwriter, and reinforced the breakthrough made by Exotica (1994), in which a man harbouring an awful secret you dread being revealed keeps coming back to a strip-club’s schoolgirl-costumed dancer.

"When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion," writes Margaret Atwood in Alias Grace, and it's these words that open Stories We Tell, fellow Canadian Sarah Polley's fourth film. This is Polley's first documentary - although it hardly does it justice to call it that. It starts by telling a family story - a story Polley herself is indeed smack bang in the middle of - which requires her to be both director and detective, and presents her with the seemingly impossible task of distancing herself.

Katie Stelmanis of Austra has a voice that will send many listeners running to the hills. It is at once precocious and pretentious, running the gamut from quavering through a mouthful of marbles to operatic to cutesy, like the mutant offspring of La Roux, Paloma Faith and Knife/Fever Ray front woman Karin Dreijer Andersson. However, although it might take a moment or 10, once the ear has adjusted to her warbling theatrical style, there’s much to enjoy in Austra’s music.

Imagine the rising and falling piano cadences of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Then plug the gaps between each note with any of those which may have been encountered on the path to the next. Once that’s done, ensure that the playing is constant with each note bleeding into the next. Mesh the result with a similar composition played at the same time and you have some idea of how Lubomyr Melnyk’s “Windmills”, his final piece last night, sounds.

The combination of Romeo, Juliet and the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky should be almost too much for the blood pressure. Those defiant lovers, that emotive yet intellectual young Russian craftsman of ballet. Hence the huge turn-out of balletomanes for National Ballet of Canada at Sadler’s Wells last night.

It’s too obvious just to take the Canadian charm-monkey down in a bile-fest, so where to begin? He looks a bit peaky on the album cover and peakier still on the first page of the CD insert booklet (not that anyone under 40 listens to CDs). He’s lost weight. He used to be chubbier with a hint of that blank-eyed M.O.R.-damaged look which Daniel O’Donnell perfected and which grannies adore. Bublé was never just a geriatric sex daydream, though. His easy, TV chat-show demeanour is beloved of a much wider range of women, young and old.

To hear them tell it, Tegan and Sara have always been pop stars. It was harder to see a decade ago, sure, when they were spitting out spiky guitar anthems in matching pixie haircuts, but the roots were always there. That the twins’ seventh record drops the guitars so low in the mix as to render them almost inaudible in favour of bombastic electropop shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise - there were hints of it on 2009’s Sainthood, which itself came not long after they collaborated with DJ Tiesto.