Listen: Acceptance Speeches from the 2018 New York Film Critics Circle Awards Gala
Listen to some of the acceptance speeches from our 2017 ceremony.
Author: Ed Gonzalez
K. Austin Collins on Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
[Martin] McDonagh’s sense of morality readily lends itself to entertaining plot turns and impressive acting. He leans into the kinds of vicious, manipulative contradictions that make melodramas so powerful. But in this case, his predilections only lead us down a rabbit hole of dumb ideas, symbolic ironies that really only …
David Sims on Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird
Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is someone cursed with that familiar, often painful, gift of youth—absolute certainty. She feels everything strongly, expresses her opinions loudly, and both wounds and charms the people around her without meaning to. On the brink of adulthood, she’s resolute enough about her desire to go to …
Dana Stevens on Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck
The “cabinet of wonders”—a museum-like room stuffed to bursting with objects from the worlds of natural history, archaeology, and art—is a recurring theme in Todd Haynes’ new film Wonderstruck, based on a young-adult novel of the same name written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. There couldn’t be a more apt …
Bilge Ebiri on Kogonada’s Columbus
In Columbus, architecture takes the place of emotions, to sometimes startling effect. An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t. (Kogonada, by …
Jordan Hoffman on Matt Reeves’s War for the Planet of the Apes
Let my people go… ape? The “Planet of the Apes” films have always been about surprises. With a title that sounded like Samuel Z. Arkoff-level schlock, the first “Apes” picture from 1968 threw audiences for a curve as a richer-than-expected parable on racial prejudice. Then, that shocking moment — shirtless …
Richard Brody on Errol Morris’s The B-Side
Errol Morris’s quietly passionate and inspiring new film, “The B-Side,” which opens Friday, is a work of echoes and reflections. It’s a documentary portrait of Elsa Dorfman, a photographer who does mainly portraits and whose photography is inseparable from the details of her daily life. Her life and work illuminate …
Melissa Anderson on Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman
Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower is enduring for the past 75 years as a wildly unstable signifier. Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, further adds to this complicated, contradictory cluster of signs and symbols. Forged from deeply feminist sympathies, the character debuted in All Star …
Richard Lawson on Bong Joon-ho’s Okja
Though festival tiredness (and madness) may be partly to blame, I’m going to give most of the credit for my weepy Friday morning to Okja, the new film from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho which premieres Friday at the Cannes Film Festival. A rollicking rescue movie with deep ache and …
Eric Kohn on Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire
Once the guns start blazing in Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, they don’t really stop. Prolific British director Ben Wheatley’s massively entertaining recovery from the messy J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise is a more controlled form of chaos, a chamber piece in which no chamber stays empty for long. Almost exclusively set …