New York Film Critics Circle Names ‘The Brutalist’ Best Film & Its Star Adrien Brody Best Actor: Winners List
After close to three hours of deliberation, the New York Film Critics Circle named Brady Corbet’s three-hour-plus epic The Brutalist as Best Film. The group also named the pic’s star Adrien Brody as Best Actor.
A24 snapped up the movie after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it earned a 13-minute ovation. The Brutalist stars Brody as László Tóth, a World War II Hungarian refugee architect in the U.S. and Guy Pearce as the complex real estate tycoon who enlists Tóth’s talents of Brody’s character. Corbet, who won the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice, shot The Brutalist in Hungary with tax credits for under $10M. It opens on December 20. A24 also will be showing the epic, which also stars Felicity Jones and Alessandro Nivola, in 70MM.
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The NYFCC handed its Best Director award to RaMell Ross for Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross, a day after she won the same prize at the Gotham Awards. The Amazon MGM Studios pic hits theaters on December 13. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys follows the friendship between two young Black men who are navigating the harrowing trials of a Florida reform school together.
Best Actress was awarded to Marianne Jean-Baptiste for Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. In the darkly humorous study of family and the thorny ties that bind us, she plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son and anyone who looks her way.
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Best Supporting Actress went to Carol Kane for her turn in Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, which centers on a cantor (Jason Schwartzman) in a crisis of faith who finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher (Kane) re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student.
Succession Emmy winner Kieran Culkin was named Best Supporting Actor for his turn as an emotionally tortured young man in Jesse Eisenberg’s Searchlight drama A Real Pain. Culkin and Eisenberg play a pair who embark on a trip to Poland to explore the generational trauma in their family history, including a visit to a concentration camp in Poland.
The first NYFCC award, announced at 6:50 a.m. PT, was Best Animated Feature for Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow. 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.
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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 most recent NYFCC Best Film to triumph 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 Oppenheimer‘s Hoyte Van Hoytema for 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.
Here are all of this year’s NYFCC winners:
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
To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation
STUDENT AWARDS
Alexander Swift (Undergraduate, Vassar) and Drew Smith (Graduate, NYU)
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