Refresh for more…After close to three hours of deliberation, the New York Film Critics Circle named Brady Corbet’s 3-hour plus epic The Brutalist as Best Film.
A24 snapped up the movie out of its Venice Film Festival premiere. The movie, which stars Adrien Brody as a World War II Hungarian refugee architect in the U.S., also saw the former Oscar winning actor win Best Actor with the NYFCC. Guy Pearce stars in the film as the complex real estate tycoon who enlists the talents of Brody’s character, László Tóth. Corbet shot The Brutalist in Hungary with tax credits for under $10M. The Brutalist opens on Dec. 20. A24 will also be showing the epic, which also stars Felicity Jones and Alessandro Nivola, in 70MM.
It was a great evening last night for Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross, and it was a great morning to wake up to as the filmmaker was named Best Director by the NYFCC after he took home Best Director at the Gotham Awards last night. The Amazon MGM Studios theatrical release comes out on Dec. 13. Nickel Boys is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, and follows the friendship between two young African American men who are navigating the harrowing trials of a Florida reform school together.
The first NYFCC award was announced at 6:50AM PST is Best Animated Feature for
Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow. Second award went to Kieran Culkin for Best Supporting Actor for his turn as an emotionally tortured young man in Jesse Eisenberg’s Searchlight drama, A Real Pain. Culkin won Best Lead Actor for a Drama Series at the 2023 Primetime Emmys for Succession.
Best Supporting Actress went to Marianne Jean-Baptiste for Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, while Best Actress went to Carol Kane for her turn in Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples which centers around a cantor (Jason Schwartzman) in a crisis of faith, who finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student.
In the Latvia-French-Belgian production Flow, Cat is a solitary animal, but as its home is devastated by a great flood, he finds refuge on a boat populated by various species, and will have to team up with them despite their differences.
Last year, the oldest critics group in the United States selected Apple Original Films’ Killers of the Flower Moon from Martin Scorsese as best film. The group bestowed Best Director to Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer.
While NYFCC winners often become Oscar nominees, and sometimes winners, when it comes to Best Picture, the group isn’t lockstep with the AMPAS voters: The last NYFCC Best Film to continue on and win Best Picture at the Oscars was 2011’s The Artist.
Last year the NYFCC winners who ultimately won Oscars included Nolan for Best Director, Da’Vine Joy Randolph for The Holdovers, The Boy and the Heron for Best Animated Feature, and Hoyte Van Hoytema for Oppenheimer in Best Cinematography.
This is the 90th anniversary of NYFCC whose members include Indiewire’s David Ehlrich (2024 vice chair) and Kate Erbland, New York Magazine’s Alison Wilmore and Bilge Ebiri, The Atlantic’s David Sims (2024 chair), and Time’s Stephanie Zacharek.
The list of this year’s NYFCC winners is below. Keep checking back:
BEST FILM
The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)
BEST DIRECTOR
RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys
BEST ACTOR
Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
BEST ACTRESS
Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Carol Kane, Between Two Temples
BEST SCREENPLAY
Anora, Sean Baker
BEST NON-FICTION FILM
No Other Land from Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor
BEST ANIMATED FILM
Flow
BEST FIRST FILM
Annie Baker’s Janet Planet
BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM
All We Imagine As Light from Payal Kapadia
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Jomo Fray, Nickel Boys
SPECIAL AWARD
STUDENT AWARDS
