Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” was named the best film of 2024 by the New York Film Critics Circle on Tuesday afternoon. The NYFCC, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected critics organizations, traditionally gets movie awards season in full swing.
The group is made up of about 50 print and online film critics based in the city and is often the first major group of critics to announce the best films of the year. Winners will be chosen in each category by voting.
Adrien Brody’s main performance was also in the three-and-a-half hour historical drama “The Brutalist.” Meanwhile, Marianne Jean-Baptiste was named Best Actress of the year for her reunion film with British director Mike Leigh, “Hard Truths.” She was previously nominated for an Oscar for her role in Lee’s Secrets and Lies.
The award for Best Director went to Ramel Ross for his adaptation of the original story. Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel “Nickel Boys”.
Complete list of NYFCC winners (in progress)
Movie: The Brutalist (A24) Director: Ramel Roth, The Nickel Boys (Amazon MGM Studios) Actor: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist (A24) Actress: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, The Hard Truth ” (Bleecker Street) Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin “A Real Pain” (Searchlight Pictures) Best Supporting Actress: Carol Kane “Between the Temples” (Sony Pictures Classics) Screenplay: “Anora,” Sean Baker (Neon) Foreign film: “All We Imagine as Right” (Janus Films/Sideshow) Nonfiction film: “No Other Land” (No current distributor) Animated film: “Flow” (Janus Films/Sideshow) Cinematography: “Nickel Boys”, Jomo Frey (Amazon MGM Studios) First film: “Janet Planet” Annie Baker (A24) Special Award: To Save and Project: MoMA International Film Preservation Festival
The group named No Other Land, an Israeli-Palestinian co-production directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Baral, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Scholl, for Best Nonfiction Film. Longtime film critic J. Hoberman recently called the film the best film of the year on Artforum, calling it “a largely amateur digital video depiction of forced exile in the occupied West Bank.” described the film as depicting “a 20-year legal battle over the fate of the case.” A farmland area with about 20 Palestinian villages. ” This film is currently not distributed in North America.
The NYFCC also named Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light as the year’s best international film. The Indian film won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival last spring. Films that win this award are often nominated for international feature Oscars, but the jury responsible for selecting Indian films for the Academy chose Kiran Rao’s Lost Ladies instead. If Kapadia’s film is nominated for an Oscar, it will be in the general category.
“Anora,” which won the top prize Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, also won the NYFCC Award for Best Original Screenplay for writer/director Sean Baker. Baker was previously named best director for “The Florida Project” by New York critics in 2017.
kieran culkin He won the Best Supporting Actor Award for his role in “A Real Pain.” carol kane She won Best Supporting Actress that year for her role in Nate Silver’s drama Between the Temples.
The award for Best Animated Film went to Flow, directed by Latvia’s Gintu Zilvalodis. The award for Best First Film went to A24’s Janet Planet, directed by Annie Baker, and the award for Best Cinematography went to Jomo Frey for his first-person portrayal of The Nickel Boys.
NYFCC’s history goes back 90 years
The group was launched in 1935, less than a decade after the Academy Awards’ birth, as an antidote to Oscar selection and, paradoxically, a guide to what films would be included in the following year’s Oscar race. I have positioned myself as a person.
“Compared to the Oscars, the group’s best picture performance speaks for itself: ‘Citizen Kane’ over ‘How Green Was My Valley,’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’ over ‘The French Connection.’ ”, “Day for Night” is better than “The Sting”, and “It’s “Goodfellas” than “Dances with Wolves,” the group advertises. “Since 1935, the Academy Awards have awarded Best Picture to 43% of the films selected by the NYFCC.”
It’s been more than a decade since the NYFCC’s film of the year choice matched Oscar’s choice for 2011’s The Artist. Since then, most of their selections have received at least an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, including last year’s Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
This group’s acting award choices may be even further outside the mainstream, with some of the recent awards going to Regina Hall. Best Actress Award 2018 Ethan Hawke in “Support the Girls” Best Actor of 2018 Charles Melton won the 2023 Best Supporting Actor Award for “First Reformed” and 2023 Best Supporting Actor Award for “May December.” Meanwhile, the NYFCC made headlines in 1998 when it awarded Best Actress to Cameron Diaz for the gory comedy “Something About Mary.”
Their awards will be presented in January.
