Benjamin Crotty
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Alice T., Too Late to Die Young and Four More From Locarno 2018
There was a bittersweet, valedictory quality to the 71st edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Over the past decade or so, Locarno has carved out a place for itself as a space for arthouse true believers, handing out top prizes to the likes of Lav Diaz and Wang Bing and seeing premieres of key films by Pedro Costa and Chantal Akerman, in the process becoming a byword for a certain kind of distinctly 21st-century, boundary blurring art cinema—to tweak the title of one of the festival’s main programs, filmmaking “of the present.” Recently, in both a validation of everything the […]
by Daniel Witkin on Aug 15, 2018 -
Words and All: New Directors/New Films (II)
Hej hej JJ If doomsday scenarios compromised by persistent protagonists were the common denominator among the finest in week one of the back-loaded New Directors/New Films, the second week’s standouts hail successful rebounds. Entropy, smugness, resignation, and delusional security make way for palpable commitment, be it political, psychological, or emotional. The shared backdrop is the guarded, mine-ridden sphere of male bonding, more often than not inside restrictive institutions — a pair of bromances that take place within military bases and their outposts; a boy-gang dystopic chiller that revises the conventional sleepaway-school movie — but also within the split psyche of a […]
by Howard Feinstein on Mar 24, 2015 -
“An Auteur Film with Pseudo-Anonymous Dialogue”: Benjamin Crotty on Fort Buchanan
A truly original oddity, Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan melds disparate tropes of American television, queer cinema, and French arthouse to comic and dazzling effect. Buchanan unfolds at the titular army base, where husbands and wives lay in waiting for their men overseas, though the wives tend to occupy their time by attempting to seduce the gay husbands, or the temperamental daughter of the film’s most lovelorn protagonist, Roger (Andy Gillet). If something is askew in the characters’ roving dialogue, that’s because the script is entirely adapted from American TV shows, an off-kilter choice that finds a counterpart in Crotty’s cinematic language, in which seasonal set changes are ushered in […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 24, 2015 -
Last Looks: The 2014 Locarno Film Festival
[Paul Dallas’ first report can be read here.] Time wasted and time well spent — a ratio every festivalgoer has to work out when gambling on what to see and miss. At Locarno this year, one had to decide whether or not to devote five hours and forty minutes to a single competition film, the equivalent of four Italian classics from the wonderful Titanus retrospective. It wasn’t easy when the former was Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before, an early frontrunner and eventual winner of the Golden Leopard, and the latter all screened on 35mm — an increasingly powerful incentive […]
by Paul Dallas on Aug 19, 2014
