NYFCC. Awards.

Another round for No Country for Old Men and Javier Bardem, this time courtesy of the New York Film Critics Circle, who throw in Best Director and Best Screenplay for Joel and Ethan Coen to boot. Just two awards for There Will Be Blood today: Best Actor (Daniel Day Lewis) and Best Cinematographer (Robert Elswit).

Looks like we're beginning to see some solid favorites in the Actress categories: once again, it's Julie Christie for Away from Her and Amy Ryan for her supporting role in Gone Baby Gone. And Sarah Polley wins the Best First Film award (for Away from Her).

Updated through 12/11.

Best Foreign Film: The Lives of Others. Best Animated Film: Persepolis.

Sidney Lumet receives a Lifetime Achievement Award and a Special Critics' Award goes to Charles Burnett for Killer of Sheep.

Now, by the way, is a good time for a first look at the Awards Scoreboard over at Movie City News.

Updates, 12/11: Time's Richard Corliss on the critics' awards: "[W]e're essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us."

"I dropped out of the New York Film Critics Circle a few years back because I thought its awards voting process was corrupt," writes Jack Matthews in the New York Daily News. "The New York Times doesn't allow its critics to belong to critics groups and I think that's the right policy." So he's got his own list, and No Country for Old Men tops it. He also lists his favorites for Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen for Eastern Promises) and so on. Via Movie City News.

Dave Kehr isn't in complete agreement with the NYFCC's choices. No Country, he argues, is "a series of condescending portraits of assorted hicks, who are then brutally murdered for our entertainment, like an Errol Morris documentary with extra added splatter effects.... It’s disheartening to see this kind of facile cynicism become the default moral position of so many critics (the film also won the Boston and Washington, DC critics awards), particularly in a year when there is so much complex, considered cynicism readily available: There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Beowulf, Sweeney Todd."

Glenn Kenny responds to Richard Corliss.

Posted by dwhudson at December 10, 2007 2:38 PM