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Another precursor chimed in yesterday, with the National Society of Film Critics awarding their annual citations. This time around, they went for Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland in Best Picture, also giving Zhao the Best Director prize, while star Frances McDormand took home the Best Actress award. Nomadland did well, while the love was spread around otherwise, continuing a trend that’s been season long. Until the Guilds eventually chime in, that’s just how things are going to be, so sit tight for how things progress. Undoubtedly, this was a good precursor for Nomadland, but the movie certainly has a long way to go still… Here now are the winners from the National Society of Film Critics: Best Picture Winner: Nomadland 2nd place: First Cow 3rd place: Never Rarely Sometimes Always Best Director Winner: Chloé Zao, Nomadland 2nd place: Steve McQueen, Small Axe 3rd place: Kelly Reichardt, First Cow Best Actress Winner: Frances McDormand,...

Acting wins for Frances McDormand, Delroy Lindo.

Nomadland was voted best picture by The National Society Of Film Critics winners on Saturday (January 9) and won four prizes overall, including director for Chloé Zhao, whose The Rider was named best picture three years ago.

The film about the existence of a modern-day nomad drifting through the margins of American society earned 52 points in the group’s weighted ballot system, two ahead of Kelly Reichardt’s period tale First Cow, and 11 ahead of Eliza Hittman’s abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Nomadland also earned the actress award for Frances McDormand, and...

The National Society of Film Critics named Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand, the best picture of 2020.

Runners-up for the best picture category were First Cow and Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Nomadland won big during Saturday’s annual voting ceremony as Zhao walked away with the best director win and McDormand won the best actress category.

Additional honorees were Da 5 Bloods‘ Delroy Lindo and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm breakout Maria Bakalova, who won the ceremony’s best actor and supporting actress prizes, respectively.

The Nsfc’s 55th annual voting meeting selected winners and runners-up in 11 categories via a weighted ballot system.

Any film that opened in the US on a screen or streaming platform during the year is eligible for consideration. Last year, the group handed Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite its top prize, Best Picture, a feat the film duplicated at the Oscars.

The 60-members Nsfc include critics from...

Following our top 50 films of 2020 and more year-end coverage, we’re pleased to share personal top 10s of 2020 from our contributors.

Oh, where to begin? There’s usually so much to complain about. Yes, 2020 was rough. It was like if the second half of mother! was directed by three minions in a trench coat posing as McGruff the Crime Dog and then came to life. Even the film world was odd. Stuff got pushed to VOD. Studios delayed tent poles a year back in some cases. In what has to be the longest record since I was three years old, I haven’t been to a theater since March 12. I’m all but sure it’ll be more than a few months before it’s safe (or even possible) to see something again on the big screen, but getting this handful of movies is more than a nice consolation prize.

A funeral procession emerges from the pitch-black center of a walled cemetery outside of Lisbon. Mourners move past the camera, but no one speaks of the deceased or of anything else. For the first 10 minutes of Pedro Costa’s latest, “Vitalina Varela,” wordless sound design and an immersive darkness settle in, the storytelling restricted to the aftermath of sickness and an unknown man’s last days.

Costa’s films often star first-time or other nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves, with storylines reflecting their real lives, elements of fiction and documentary forming a seamless whole; as such Vitalina Varela plays “herself.” And as the film opens, and Vitalina arrives, she’s three days too late. The funeral was for Joaquim, the husband who abandoned Vitalina years earlier, and this three-day passage amounts to an anti-resurrection. Here, the dead stay dead.

Vitalina positions herself in the shadowy, crumbling hovel where Joaquim lived and died,...

Vitalina Varela stars as herself in Pedro Costa’s bleak but beautiful film about a woman discovering the hidden life of her late husband

If there is a cinema of the dispossessed, then its hero has to be the Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa. His static, austere and often dreamlike movies – unfolding in a mysterious, forbidding semi-darkness – are about marginalised souls, often those in the impoverished (and now demolished) Fontaínhas shantytown in Lisbon. His new film once again reminded me of the pure Beckettian bleakness and starkness in his work: its characters are lonely unsmiling people living below the poverty line who have endured much. Their material wretchedness is not endowed with a condescending nobility but with a serenely laconic self-reliance. Costa and cinematographer Leonardo Simões have composed strangely compelling images of crumbling walls and shadowy, tatty interiors, picked out with fierce key lights to give them an almost modernist look,...

The International Cinephile Society is known for going its own way with its annual awards, and its latest edition is no exception. Leading the field for its 17th awards was Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical “Pain and Glory,” which won best picture, and best actor for Antonio Banderas.

The Ics is made up of more than 100 accredited journalists, film scholars, historians and other industry professionals. Led by Ics president Cédric Succivalli, each year the Ics honors the finest in American and international cinema.

Best director went to Céline Sciamma for her 18th-century story of obsession “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” while the film’s Adèle Haenel earned the supporting actress prize.

Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” – which is up for six Oscars this weekend – was another hot Ics favorite, winning original screenplay, ensemble and production design awards.

Vitalina Varela won the lead actress prize for her role as a Cape...

Frequently beautiful compositions and the theatrical use of a fierce kind of artifice have long been the hallmarks of Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa, regarded by a small but influential group of aesthetes as one of the great filmmakers of our era. For those in tune with his vision, the director’s films offer an exciting lesson in just how far a strict adherence to formalism over narrative structure can be taken, yet for cinephiles less bewitched by the way he creates vacuums between characters, and his insistent reliance on rigidly composed images to generate intellectualized emotions, his works are distancing and cold. “Vitalina Varela” will create animated debate between the uneven camps, and for those less inclined toward Costa’s brand of cinema, only the powerful screen presence of the lead, whose life story this is, saves this punishingly dark work from drowning in its own purposeful opacity.

Were Costa...

The mystery and wonder of Pedro Costa’s filmmaking defies any specific category other than his own unique blend. The Portuguese director conjures dark, dreamlike visions of post-colonial neglect and yearning that hover somewhere between fantasy and neorealism, horror and melodrama, spirituality and desperation. “Vitalina Varela,” Costa’s fifth journey into the shantytown Fontainhas outside of Lisbon, once again showcases Costa’s masterful ability to mine cinematic poetry from a unique environment and the mournful figures who wander through its murky depths.

The Costa Expanded Universe stems back to 2006’s “Colossal Youth,” when Costa first began exploring the Cape Verdean residents of Fontainhas by casting members of the immigrant community as themselves. Costa’s ravishing blend of light and shadow captures the characters as they wander the claustrophobic interiors of their ramshackle homes and muse about their wandering lives. Costa’s dour, humorless aesthetic takes time to settle in and...

★★★☆☆ "It was a low, late afternoon light ... that only spoke of distant things." And so it is that a film seems to perfectly encapsulate itself in the delivery of a single line of dialogue. Those words are spoken by the protagonist of Vítor Gonçalves' The Invisible Life (2013) in a typical moment of reflective voiceover as he traverses a dimly lit hallway. This is a film that clearly has ambition to expound poetically about existential malaise and deep-seated loneliness; but it's all fustian, amounting to little more than its muted brown hues, some strikingly elegant compositions and vague discussions of things too remote for them to ever drift into clear focus. Drifting is the apposite word.

This is not a film that is driven by any narrative or thematic concerns, but which instead moves at a gloomy glissade. The Invisible Life is Portuguese director Gonçalves' first work in over 25 years...

Pedro Costa’s new film, Horse Money, represents a return to familiar ground for the portuguese filmmaker. Between arthouse and documentary filmmaking, Pedro Costa is celebrated everywhere around the world but in his own country . His peculiar and unconventional style of filmmaking is focused on phantasmagoric characters embedded in beautiful framed compositions of light, perspective and form. Each frame could easily be turned into a painting full of visual contrast, warmth and textures.

In our conversation with Costa he talked about the stagnation and cloistering Portugal as a society without any sense of sociological reality since the coming of the 20th century. That since the 1900s the country has closed itself off and isolated itself from foreign realities: the consequences have crippled the nation. Costa discusses the sad state of European cinema, defined by a few choice auteurs and ultimately threatened due to austerity measures and unfavorable political landscapes. He is referring,...