U.S. film critics continue to make a few curious choices.
At the 2006 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, announced earlier today, the most interesting winner was the best foreign language film: the somber 1969 French Resistance drama L'Armée des ombres / Army of Shadows, adapted for the screen (from a novel by Joseph Kessel) and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Both Melville (born Grumbach) and Kessel were French Jews who joined the Resistance in 1941.
Though made more than 35 years ago, L'Armée des ombres was only this year released in the United States. Yesterday, the film won a Special Mention from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. In the cast: Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and Simone Signoret (above).
Among the other top New York Critics winners were best film United 93, the tale of the plane that was brought down on a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001; best actor Forest Whitaker for his Uganda leader Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland; and best actress Helen Mirren (above, with James Cromwell in the background) for perfectly bringing to screen life another real-life leader, Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. (Mirren had previously won the NYFCC award in 2001, as a supporting actress, for Gosford Park.)
Also, best director Martin Scorsese for handling the absurd crime drama The Departed (Scorsese had previously won in 1990, for Goodfellas); and best screenplay, The Queen by Peter Morgan.
Letters from Iwo Jima, the top film at both the Los Angeles Critics and the National Board of Review awards, showed up only once among the New York Critics top three choices: Third place for Clint Eastwood in the best director category.
In The Gold Derby, Tom O'Neil explains that The Queen and The Departed (above, with Matt Damon and Martin Sheen) were actually the New York critics' two favorites. However, due to their labyrinthine voting rules, United 93 won as a "compromise" choice.
Reading O'Neil's description of the event, I couldn't quite figure out how the New York critics' voting system works — or doesn't work. In fact, the absurd strategic voting patterns described in O'Neil's article make the New York Film Critics Circle awards seem like even more of a joke than the Golden Globes.
Also worth a look: In another Gold Derby article, Tom O'Neil discusses the New York Film Critics' bizarre way of appeasing two warring factions by picking a (sometimes absurd) third-party winner (e.g., Cameron Diaz, chosen best actress of 1998 for looking believably blonde in the godawful There's Something About Mary).