Jonathan Glazer’s innovative Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest picked up the Film of the Year gong at the London Critics’ Circle Awards Sunday evening.
The German-language drama also won prizes for director and awards for music and sound. The pic’s leading haul was matched by Andrew Haigh’s enigmatic romantic drama All Of Us Strangers, which won the Attenborough Award for British/Irish Film of the Year. Andrew Scott took Actor of the Year, and co-star Paul Mescal won British/Irish Performer for his body of work in 2023.
Actress of the Year went to Emma Stone for Poor Things, while supporting performance awards were won by Da’Vine Joy Randolph for The Holdovers and Charles Melton for May December. All three accepted their awards on videotape. Justine Triet and Arthur Harari were on hand to receive the Screenwriter award for Anatomy of a Fall, and director Mstyslav Chernov arrived to accept Documentary of the Year for 20 Days in Mariupol. Celine Song’s Past Lives was named Foreign-Language Film of the Year, while Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron won the Animated Film award.
Jeffrey Wright was awarded the Dilys Powell Award for Excellence in Film, presented to him by American Fiction director Cord Jefferson. And Misan Harriman, Oscar-nominated this year for his short The After, presented the inaugural Derek Malcolm Award for Innovation to Colman Domingo, who had received the award in a small videotaped ceremony two days earlier in London.
Mia McKenna-Bruce received the group’s first international Breakthrough Performance award for How to Have Sex, and the film’s writer-director Molly Manning Walker won the Philip French Award for British/Irish Breakthrough Filmmaker. Other British/Irish winners included Lola Campbell as Young Performer for Scrapper, and Natalie Cubides-Brady, director of short film The Veiled City.
The London Critics’ Circle Film Awards are voted by the 210-member Film Section of the Critics’ Circle. Films are automatically eligible if they are released in UK cinemas or on premiere streaming services between mid-February 2023 and mid-February 2024.
