NYFCC loves "Da 5 Bloods" and "Never Rarely Sometimes Always"
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 4:49PM by Nathaniel R
The New York Film Critics Circle have spoken, delivering their verdict on the Best of 2020. The only films which scored multiple awards were Da 5 Bloods and Never Rarely Sometimes Always. But the top prize went to First Cow (which is the only prize it won). This year featured the most female directors they've ever honored simultaneously with female-helmed films winning Best Film, Best First Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (all four of them different films, too!). Their honors for 2020 go like so...
BEST FILM First Cow
BEST DIRECTOR Chloé Zhao, Nomadland
BEST ACTRESS Sidney Flanagan, Never Rarely Sometimes Always
BEST ACTOR Delroy Lindo, Da 5 Bloods
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR Chadwick Boseman, Da 5 Bloods
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY Small Axe (all films)
Strange that they didn't credit the cinematographer when they first announced this so I assumed it was different people but it turns out Shabier Kirchner shot all five of the films. We hadn't heard of him so we looked up the filmography. His debut feature was Throuple (2015) and he shot well received festival features like Sollers Point (2017) and Bull (2019) previously.
BEST SCREENPLAY Eliza Hittman, Never Rarely Sometimes Always
BEST ANIMATED FILM Wolfwalkers
BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM Bacurau
BEST NON-FICTION FILM Time
BEST FIRST FILM The 40 Year Old Version
SPECIAL AWARD: Spike Lee
...for inspiring the New York community with his short film “New York New York” and for advocating for a better society through cinema.
SPECIAL AWARD: Kino Lorber
...for their creation of Kino Marquee, a virtual cinema distribution service that was designed to help support movie theaters, not destroy them.
Hear hear.
Reader Comments (50)
I haven't yet seen First Cow but that title seems very capitalist. Hope I'm wrong. Chadwick is building momentum. Good.
Me34 -- not sure what you mean (about the title) but the movie is thematically about capitalism in quite a lot of ways.
After being tortured to the death (yeah, I'm dead) with every Kelly Reichardt movie pre-First Cow (I've really tried to like her work!), I cannot bring myself to see First Cow. I just don't get the appeal of any of her movies.
Is Sidney Flanigan that much more far-fetched than Catalina Sandino Moreno in MARIA FULL OF GRACE? Focus Features could pull it off...
Americans that love bacurau, please advocate for your institutions tô stop harassing other peoples countrys
@ Me34
Florida Film Critics Circle(FFCC) nominated him twice:
Lead - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and
Supporting - Da 5 Bloods
Reichardt can be an acquired taste, but once you've got it you're a fan for life. CERTAIN WOMEN was the film where I felt she had finally made her masterpiece. I like it better than FIRST COW, in fact. Sometimes people get the praise they deserve one film after they've hit the bullseye.
Sidney Flanigan emerges as a dark horse contender.
Omg BORAT 2 with a Best Supporting Actress win!! I’m ecstatic!
Time to put Maria Bakalova in your charts, Nathaniel.
If critics continue to rally behind Sidney Flanagan, she might actually happen at the Oscars.
That Boseman win is a signal.
Damn... now these are some solid-ass picks. Much love to the NYFCC. They always had some daring choices. Now I want to see what the LAFCC picks.
Chicago & Florida film critics also released nominations today, starting to feel like there is a season.
@ BJT
With double nodes for Boseman.
I share the same feelings of @CharlieG towards Kelly Reichardt;
Never Rarely Sometimes Always didn't impress me that much, not the way it seems to impress other people, go figures.
Love the Bacurau win, such an important film.
NY went with Tiffany Haddish for Girls Trip and Cameron Diaz for Mary. They like picking comedy actresses when they can.
I don't get the Bakalova thing.
I know you don't like to talk about locks but Chloe's shot is so real this year.
I have not seen any of these films.
I feel like Boseman wasn’t in Da 5 Bloods that much?
@CharlieG with you there. I liked some of Certain Women, Wendy and Lucy genuinely great, the rest bore me
To see the names and film titles of beautiful works from Kelly Reichardt, Eliza Hittmann and Chloe Zhao is a rare thing in my world: when what I personally like aligns with film critics' choices. I can't remember there was an abundance like these.
I agree that Reichardt's films can be an acquired taste bur when you enter her cinematic lifeworlds it can be extremely captivating. While I still consider Old Joy my favorite of hers, all others have an exquisiteness that is hard to define but can only be felt when she starts training her camera on quotidian ordinariness. And when Lucy in Wendy and Lucy finally understood the genuine gesture of a stranger, her tentative and grudging acknowledgment of the true kindness of strangers can be heady and potent. In First Cow, the smile and surprise when King Lu reunited with Cookie in their shared abode was so touching, it felt like love. It was love.
Through the years, I developed a deep fondness and liking to naturalistic acting and Zhao, Hittmann and Reichardt are the true exemplars of this art. To give us unaffected and moving performances ranging from Lily Gladstone and Will Oldham to Brady Jandreau and Gina Piersanti -- those are crowning achievements in cinema.
I’m glad that there are others out there who didn’t care for First Cow. I was afraid that I was the only one.
Charlie et al:
I, too, do not understand the appeal of Kelly Reichardt. Why an actress as talented as Michelle Williams wastes her time with this director is beyond me.
@ ken s.
Partly post-Dawson's Creek syndrome.
Kenny -- Bakalova has been on the chart for awhile. Do you mean raise her higher than #7? I know it's a thin field but Oscar embracing improv comedy seems like a stretch (though i love her in it)
First Cow blows
I DO like Chadwick in Da 5 Bloods (and that cast is great), but even JUST of the genuine supporting roles in that movie (aka: Everyone but Clarke Peters and Delroy Lindo), he's third best man OF THAT MOVIE, let alone THE YEAR. Honestly, I would prefer Isiah Whitlock Jr. or ESPECIALLY Jonathan Majors getting heat for it over him.
I really like Kelly Reichardt's films, but I understand why not everyone does. It's also kind of ironic to me that a woman who tends to make film about women is getting the most recognition of her career for a film about men. (Yes, I know about Old Joy.)
Cash: but the cow is female!
What I don't get is Maria Bakalova in Supporting. She's definitely a lead, no?
Overrated: First Cow Underrated: Never Rarely Sometimes Always
I liked First Cow but thought it fell just short of its mark. That said, the cinematography is stunning.
@Nathaniel: Can you please clarify this Small Axe mess? As I read in the imdb, it's not a movie. It's an anthology mini-series by Steve McQueen. How can it qualify for a film award?
Well, the Kelly Reichardt haters are coming out of the woodwork. They're not the kind of films that work well on a laptop, or a phone, maybe that's the issue.
Joseph -- that's what supporting means
Meeks Cutoff is Reichardt’s best. Stunning final reveal.
@Peg — I suppose. But he was also not very memorable.
@Daniella - I tried to watch it on a TV at home, like most people, because theaters are shut down. Shame that’s the only way most people will see it.
@Joseph Well, you have to take that into account with the kind of Slow Cinema Rechhardt, Akerman, Tarr, Ming-liang Tsai, etc. make. I saw JEANNE DIELMAN in a theater and thought it was a masterpiece. If I would have seen it at home on a 26 inch lap top screen, I would have kept pausing it to go to the kitchen, gotten distracted by other things in my field of vision, and it wouldn't have been able to envelop me. I would have ended up saying I thought it was a colossal bore. We can't go to theaters, but we can watch films on the biggest screen possible (say a 60 inch home monitor), turn the lights off. put the remote on the other side of the room to resist the temptation to keep using it, and just try to let the film do its thing.
@Joseph Well, you have to take that into account with the kind of Slow Cinema Rechhardt, Akerman, Tarr, Ming-liang Tsai, etc. make. I saw JEANNE DIELMAN in a theater and thought it was a masterpiece. If I would have seen it at home on a 26 inch lap top screen, I would have kept pausing it to go to the kitchen, gotten distracted by other things in my field of vision, and it wouldn't have been able to envelop me. I would have ended up saying I thought it was a colossal bore. We can't go to theaters, but we can watch films on the biggest screen possible (say a 60 inch home monitor), turn the lights off. put the remote on the other side of the room to resist the temptation to keep using it, and just try to let the film do its thing.
Really happy for Lindo and Bakalova. Rooting for Chloe Zhao to win Best Director this year. She deserves it!
I agree that Certain Women is Reichardt's masterpiece. I think Dan Humphrey may be the first person I've seen share my perspective on that. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out - the masterful actressing alone is worth your time. Yes, some filmmakers do receive the praise they deserve one film late.
Cosigning the Certain Women praise. That Gladstone / Stewart segment!
Marcos -- from my understanding it was pitched as an anthology series and produced and financed that way so for me it's television. I think what's confusing people is that most of the installments are feature length and at least two of the installments had big festival premieres.
but it seems fitting that the line between tv and film is even more blurred than usual this year.
I've loved seeing Brian Dennehy for DRIVEWAYS show up at some of these early critics awards. Hoping some momentum can build to make that happen. I thought his work was really wonderful, particularly the final monologue he gets at the end of the film.
Does anyone know, if Boseman and Dennehy are both nominated would it be the first year with two posthumous acting nominees? I can't think of any others...
Does anyone know who the second place finishers were?
I always find the runners-up to be fascinating as well. Anyone know? Guess I'll dig around online.
@Daniella -- Totally get that and I agree. That's one of the most frustrating things about this year of "cinema." I get that people in certain parts of the US and indeed the world only have the option of seeing certain films at home. For me, and I'm spoiled that way, I can see everything in a theater in NYC. Chances are, if it's released in the US, some theater is playing it. That's how I watch movies and have been for many years. Typically, I watch television at home, or the type of middlebrow film that I can't be bothered to see in a theater.
That's why this year is so frustrating. I understand most critics saw 'First Cow' in a theater, either at some festival or some screening before its official release, but if memory serves me right, it was only playing in NYC for a few weeks before the theaters shut down.
It's less a knock on the film, but in general, how difficult it is to evaluate films this year as a whole. And as you rightly call out, this applies more to the art-house fare than it does, say, blockbusters, which I think for the most part play just fine at home.
Uh oh. I just saw First Cow - and I like it a lot. Best film of the year? Well no, but a decent choice, nevertheless. Better to acknowledge a surprisingly good movie than resist it for ideological consistency.
Good for Bakalova.
It won't make any sense to have a performance as bland as Amanda Seyfried's nominated instead of something actually good and exciting like Bakalova's.
@Opinion Giver... Seyfried is fantastic in a quiet but key role... she may seem to not do much, but she is probably the emotional core of Mank, by humanizing Marion Davies, the main reference for Mank himself, on how to write Citizen Kane.
Still, Bakalova should be taking Lead or Supporting - she's a Lead, to me, but I understand that in Supporting she has more chances - by a mile over the competition. Bakalova's role was suicidal, a career-ending, walked the tightrope with actual danger - while Sacha Baron Cohen wore a bulletproof jacket at some point, she never did - and achieved the impossible task of being on par, and almost eclipse at certain points, one of the true master of comedic improvisation in screen history. My jaw is still dropped and I fully understand that someone who does not really care about awards as Sacha Baron Cohen, is enthusiastic with her being nominated at least for an Oscar. He found his on screen match.
I don’t really get the win for Boseman for Da 5 Bloods. He’s more of a symbol or idea in the movie than a character, all in fairly brief flashbacks or visions too so it’s not really an acting achievement. Paul Raci in Sound of Metal is my favorite supporting actor performance of the year bar none and I hope he steamrolls the rest of the critic awards.
Andrew : could not agree with you more about Raci. And cosign with you on Boseman. With all the fantastic supporting male performances this year, to choose someone who is not even the most memorable Supporting actor in his own film is just ludicrous.