Florida Film Critics Circle (and more)

Given our most recent podcast conversation in which Florida film critic Alfred Soto was a guest star, we wanted to inform you of the end results of The Florida Film Critics Circle's year end "best" discussions. The Favourite took their top prize but the big story is how fully they embraced Asian cinema with two acting prizes for Asian actors and additional prizes for Shoplifters (foreign film), Shirkers (documentary), and Mirai (animated film).

The 26 member wide organization is spread out all around Florida and has been in existence since 1996, just before the boom (2002-2012) when every city and/or state decided they needed an organization, sometimes two of them!) Their full list of winners (along with a handful of other groups that announced earlier that we neglected to mention) are after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Toronto, Boston, and NY Online Critics Join the Loud "Best" Chorus

by Nathaniel R

Our friends to the north in Toronto gave their biggest prize to a film of the south, Sean Baker's The Florida Project. In their supporting categories they stuck with the clear critical frontrunners Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project) and Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird) both of whom are probably locking up Oscar nominations in their categories if not the win yet. Toronto's full awards plus the venerable Boston Society of Film Critics and New York Film Critics Online are after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Review: Jake Gyllenhaal gets "Stronger"

by Eric Blume

Have patience watching director David Gordon Green’s film Stronger, which captures real-life Boston native Jeff Bauman (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) as he’s caught in the 2013 Marathon bombing.  After a rickety start, Green relaxes into a nice rhythm and delivers an almost extinct creature: a true adult movie drama.

The first few scenes of Stronger come on a little, ahem, strong.  They’re written to show what a great guy Bauman is (he cuts out from work so he and his lucky beer can help the Red Sox win, he stands up for his gay boss), and Green has all the actors pushing too hard.  The initial scene where we meet Bauman’s family (including mom Miranda Richardson and girlfriend Tatiana Maslany) in a bar reeks of Boston cliché.  It’s a very tricky thing, honestly capturing that lower-middle-class Beantown language and attitude, and Green overplays his hand in this and several other early scenes.  The energy is overly commercial, and the movie gets off to an uneasy start.

But once the big sequence begins, where Bauman loses his legs in the terrible terrorist attack, Green begins observing smaller details, and starts scoring...

Click to read more ...

Boston Loves "Manchester"

The Boston Film Critics Society formed in 1980 divvying up their first year of prizes largely between Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull and Jonathan Demme's undeappreciated Melvin & Howard. (Both auteurs would reign again with the BFCS via The Departed and Silence of the Lambs). While they don't often out on stylish limbs and aren't as invested in foreign films as they once did and were, when they return to either of those impulses it's often exciting. Our absolute favorite thing they occassional do is a weirdo but "why, yes, actually!" supporting performance pick like Toni Collette for The Hours, Juliette Lewis in Conviction or Ezra Miller in Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Here's what they chose as Best for 2016 along with several trivia notes...

Click to read more ...

Boston Film Critics choose hometown heroes -- "Spotlight" for Best Picture

Every other year the BSFC chooses the future Oscar winner as their Best Picture. Look at the evidence: 2009 The Hurt Locker; 2010: The Social Network; 2011: The Artist; 2012: Zero Dark Thirty; 2014: 12 Years a Slave; 2015: Boyhood. Before that it's a little bumpier statistically since 2008 saw a tie between Slumdog Millionaire (the eventual Oscar winner and WALL•E, a much more deserving (and braver) choice. But it was only in 2006 with The Departed that they started lining up regularlyt. Before then Boston could often be counted on for more iconoclastic choices like Mulholland Drive, Out of Sight, Three Kings, Trainspotting, Bull Durham, Ran, etcetera. They've been handing out awards since 1980 when Raging Bull won their inaugural Best Picture award.

Here's what they chose this year...

Click to read more ...