Sunset Circle names "TÁR" best of the year
Wednesday, November 30, 2022 at 9:08AM
NATHANIEL R in Tår, film critics
by Nathaniel R

Sarah Polley's philosophical drama Women Talking and Park Chan Wook's twisty noir Decision to Leave led the nominations for the Sunset Circle Awards in their third year but came up mostly empty-handed when it came to wins. Todd Field's TÁR emerged as the big winner taking Picture, Director, Actress, and Screenplay. The smaller the critics group the more likely you are to have nominee and winners list with some personality. Whether or not that personality is a good one is of course up to the eye of the beholder. Sunset Circle is composed of just 9 film journalists who specialize in awards coverage. We don't love that they vote before all the movies are screened each year in order to be first but we do love that they don't try to predict the Oscars. No critics group should. If you're voting on anything other than your own preferences, you're doing it wrong! Their nominees and winners (marked by ★) follow along with a few more comments... 

TOP FILMS

 

A nice spread of genres and release dates there!  That said recency bias is a fact of life / human nature and nearly all awards groups bear this out in some small way since you can watch as it happens in real time as the season goes on and various groups vote in different weeks (and even different months). In their nominations, for instance, you'll see much more love for Black Panther, She Said, and The Menu than you're likely to see later in the season from critics awards; all three were very "new" right before voting. There are limits though. Recency did not help Babylon which had big screenings on both coasts a handful of days before they voted on their nominations. It received no nominations


BEST DIRECTOR

 


BEST ACTOR

 

Awards season is *just* starting. So it'll be interesting to see what the critical consensus becomes. Seems like it could be nicely competitive (even if the Oscar race might not be)

 


BEST ACTRESS

 

 


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

 

 

The Sunset Circle is obviously not big on smaller roles as nominees for supporting. Notice they went with Dano over Hirsch, and Gleeson over Keoghan for their films. We think one of those decisions are correct and incorrect, respectively. There's more to a performance than the size of a role! 


BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

 

Giving the year's most egregious case of Category Fraud a "supporting" win is just (sigh).

About Hong Chau being cited for two films. That used to be common for critics groups but with the increasing habit of critics groups releasing nominee lists first instead of just naming winners, we've seen this decrease a lot as that doesn't work with simple vote counts. The double citations naturally spring up more in discussion- based critics awards decisions. 


BEST ENSEMBLE

 

 


BEST SCREENPLAY

 


BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

 

BEST SCORE

 



BEST EDITING

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

BEST HORROR FILM

 

FIVE FIRE DIRECTORS


SCENE STEALER

 

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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