The International Documentary Association presented its awards last night and, as Dave McNary reports for Variety, when Laura Poitras accepted her award for best feature, she said of Edward Snowden, “What he did was probably the most extraordinary act I’ve ever seen so we could know more as citizens.” The winners:
- Best Feature: Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour.
- Best Short: Andrew Hinton and Johnny Burke’s Tashi and the Monk.
- Best Curated Series: Independent Lens (Executive Producer: Sally Jo Fifer).
- Best Limited Series: Time of Death (Executive Producers: Cynthia Childs, Dan Cutforth, Casey Kriley, Jane Lipsitz and Alexandra Lipsitz).
- Best Episodic Series: Our America with Lisa Ling (Executive Producers: Amy Bucher, Gregory Henry, Lisa Ling and David Shadrack Smith).
- Best Short Form Series: Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt (Executive Producer: Alex Blumberg).
- David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award: Zuxin Hou’s My Dad’s a Rocker.
- Humanitas Documentary Award: Thomas G. Miller’s Limited Partnership.
- Pare Lorentz Award: Andrew Hinton and Johnny Burke’s Tashi and the Monk.
- ABC News VideoSource Award: Johanna Hamilton’s 1971.
- Best Cinematography: Hatuey Viveros Lavielle for Elevator.
- Best Editing: Don Kleszy for Last Days in Vietnam.
- Best Music: Nick Urata for Alfred and Jakobine.
- Best Writing: John Maloof and Charlie Siskel for Finding Vivian Maier.
- Career Achievement Award: Robert Redford.
- Pioneer Award: Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.
- Preservation and Scholarship Award: Rithy Panh.
- Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award: Darius Clark Monroe.
James Quandt Artforum Top Ten pic.twitter.com/izj8hJ7ECq
— Jordan Cronk (@JordanCronk) December 6, 2014
The Boston Online Film Critics Association has announced its awards:
- Best Picture: Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer.
- Best Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu for Birdman.
- Best Actor: Brendan Gleeson for Calvary.
- Best Actress: Marion Cotillard for Two Days, One Night.
- Best Supporting Actor: Edward Norton for Birdman.
- Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton for Snowpiercer.
- Best Screenplay: John Michael McDonagh for Calvary.
- Best Foreign Language Film: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night.
- Best Documentary: Steve James’s Life Itself.
- Best Animated Film: Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s The Lego Movie.
- Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki for Birdman.
- Best Editing: James Herbert and Laura Jennings for Edge of Tomorrow.
- Best Original Score: Mica Levi for Under the Skin.
- Best Ensemble: Birdman.
And the BOFCA wraps it up with a top ten:
- Snowpiercer.
- Under the Skin.
- Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood.
- Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive.
- Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook.
- Two Days, One Night.
- Birdman.
- Calvary.
- Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.
- Ava DuVernay’s Selma.
LISTS
Time Out New York‘s Joshua Rothkopf has posted his annotated list of the “20 best movies of 2014.” His #1: Boyhood: “Even with all the gush spilled over Richard Linklater’s 12-years-in-the-making family saga, it still might be underpraised: In watching these actors age, learn and grow (without recourse to melodrama or suspense), viewers grasped onto a beautiful continuum that few filmmakers achieve. The wait was worth it.”
Amy Taubin Artforum Top Ten pic.twitter.com/aIT3F38120
— Jordan Cronk (@JordanCronk) December 6, 2014
Time‘s Richard Corliss writes up his top ten. His #1: The Grand Budapest Hotel: “Amour and mortality, romance and horror, comedy and tragedy duel to a sumptuous draw in Wes Anderson’s rich torte of a movie—perhaps the most seductively European film ever made by a kid from Houston, Texas.” And his #1 performance: Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game.
Time‘s also posted a list of the ten worst movies of the year. #1: Blended, “which shipped Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore off to an African vacation [and] was condemned as blatantly offensive—the crimes against the African characters are too numerous to count.”
On to television. James Poniewozik‘s #1: Transparent. “Jeffrey Tambor gives the performance of the year as Maura Pfefferman, née Mort, a septuagenarian changing her identity from male to female and the ‘trans parent’ of the title. (Don’t worry, it took me a while to get the pun too.)” His top episode: “I left Mad Men off my top-10 series list because the final season had just built up steam before it stopped halfway through. (See you in 2015!) But the second-to-last hour was one of the series’ finest ever.”
“It’s been a fantastic year for TV watchers and an exhausting year for DVRs and broadband routers,” writes Hank Stuever in the Washington Post. His #1: “The Americans has everything we say we value in this ‘golden age of television’: high-tension storytelling, precise writing, big surprises, period details and deeply conflicted characters.”
“When publishing last year’s top 10 list, I referred to 2013 as ‘The Year of Too Much Good TV,'” recalls Alan Sepinwall at HitFix. “2014 looks at 2013, laughs and calls it a piker.” And “no work of art in 2014 resonated with me more deeply than HBO’s The Leftovers.”
J. Hoberman Artforum Top Ten pic.twitter.com/I5oq1EeFOR
— Jordan Cronk (@JordanCronk) December 6, 2014
EW‘s Chris Nashawaty comments on his ten best and five worst films of 2014. The best best: “Damien Chazelle‘s thrillingly brutal masterpiece Whiplash.” The worst worst: Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac “is, was, and shall always be pretentious hooey and hackwork.”
Sean Burns‘s top ten comes to us without comment. His #1: Alex Ross Perry‘s Listen Up Philip.
The Guardian‘s countdown creeps along with Andrew Pulver on #8 (Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida), Henry Barnes on #7 (Dan Gilroy’s’s Nightcrawler) and Xan Brooks on #6 (Two Days, One Night).
Tom Shone‘s listed his top ten soundtracks. #1: Interstellar (Hans Zimmer).
The Playlist writes up its “17 Most Thrilling Action Sequences of the Year.”
At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri‘s put together a list and argues that these are the “30 Most Important Sex Scenes in Movie History.”
At Little White Lies, Ann Lee revisits “Wong Kar-wai‘s Best Scenes.”
“I spent the last year using film from the 1980s as a weird palette cleanser,” writes designer Brandon Schaefer. “Out of all the decades to choose from, the 80s offered a mix of charm and nostalgia that provided a good defense against some of those unsettling tales in the present.” And he picks ten favorites.
The New York Times has picked its “10 Best Books of 2014.” At the Millions, over a dozen writers so far have looked back on “A Year in Reading.” And the Guardian‘s devoted a corner of its newly redesigned Culture section to the best books of the year.
This year’s Grammy nominations.
The 2014 Lists and Awards Index. For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily. Get Keyframe Daily in your inbox by signing in at fandor.com/daily.
