Village Voice. Take 6.

The results of Take 6, the annual film critics poll - the sixth, of course - conducted by the Village Voice are in and, glory be, Before Sunset is the clear winner. Just as gratifying is Richard Linklater's placing first in the "Best Director" category, and a second-place for Sunset's screenplay is nothing to sneeze at in a year when Charlie Kaufman is a shoe-in.

We can, hopefully, look forward to commentary by J Hoberman and others over the next few days (or at least by Tuesday), but in the meantime, what we have are the lists, the numbers - total points assigned by participating critics and total mentions - and the ballots, all cross-referenced and linked for hours of fun-with-stats browsing.

We can see, for example, that if Imelda Staunton and Paul Giamatti were racing in the commendably unisex showdown over "Best Performance" (they weren't, of course; there's no strategizing in a poll like this), they wound up pretty much neck-n-neck, with Julie Delpy coming in quite respectably in the #3 slot and all others trailing. The "race" for "Best Supporting Performance," though, was even tighter.

Further categories: "First Feature" (I won't spoil them all), "Documentary" (and heavens, just scan that list; let's all say it plainly, simply, slowly, just one more time: 2004 was a strong year for docs), "Cinematography" (you can guess that one), and it turns out this batch of critics is in agreement with others when it comes to films as yet "Undistributed" in the US.

Posted by dwhudson at December 23, 2004 1:38 PM