‘The Holdovers’ tops Boston Society of Film Critics’ best of ’23 picks
“The Holdovers,” director Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama shot in Massachusetts, was the big winner when the Boston Society of Film Critics met Sunday to vote on the best films and performances of 2023.
Payne’s film, about three lost souls who form an unlikely bond when they’re stuck on a prep school campus over winter break, earned a total of four awards including honors for the year’s best film and for David Hemingson’s original screenplay. Paul Giamatti, playing an embittered veteran teacher who clashes and then connects with a student holdover (Dominic Sessa), was named best actor, while Da’Vine Joy Randolph won best supporting actress honors for her role as a grieving mother who works as the school’s head cook.
The 26 voting members of the BSFC honored a range of films and filmmakers for the group’s 44th annual awards. “The Zone of Interest,” director Jonathan Glazer’s chilling Holocaust drama told from the point of view of the perpetrators, was named best non-English language film, awarded in memory of longtime Globe film critic Jay Carr. Glazer was honored as best director and for the screenplay he adapted from Martin Amis’s 2014 novel.
“Barbenheimer” also won big. Ryan Gosling nabbed best supporting actor for being “Kenough” in director Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Director Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” earned honors for best ensemble. Led by Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” the supporting cast includes Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Casey Affleck, and Kenneth Branagh.
Director Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” picked up three awards, most notably for Lily Gladstone as best actress for her breakout performance as an Osage woman living in 1920s Oklahoma. Scorsese’s longtime collaborators Thelma Schoonmaker and the late Robbie Robertson also won: Schoonmaker for best editing, an award given in honor of the late film editor Karen Schmeer, and Robertson, who died in August, for his score.
Celine Song was named best new filmmaker for “Past Lives,” her delicate drama about childhood friends from South Korea who reunite two decades later in New York. That award is given in memory of David Brudnoy.
Best cinematography went to Jonathan Ricquebourg for his work on “The Taste of Things,” a luminous, food-centered romance in 19th-century France. Best documentary, awarded in memory of Lucia Small, went to the immersive “Geographies of Solitude,” about a naturalist living on remote Sable Island in the northwest Atlantic.
Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron,” which the 82 year-old filmmaker has said will be his last, earned the prize for the year’s best animated film.
The BSFC also gave special commendations to five area film festivals: the Independent Film Festival Boston for 20 years as “the premiere film festival in the Greater Boston area”; the Boston Asian American Film Festival for its 15 years highlighting and celebrating the work of artists from the Asian diaspora; the Boston Palestine Film Festival for over 15 years of film screenings, with special recognition for the “extraordinary efforts undertaken in October 2023 to pivot to an online format when rapidly unfolding world events coincided with the timing of this local festival”; the Salem Film Festival for 15 years of “outstanding programming”; and the Roxbury International Film Festival for its revival showing of “Squeeze” (1997), “a milestone Bostonmade work of African-American cinema” and for its tribute to the filmmakers, Robert Patton-Spruill and Patti Moreno.