The Toronto Film Critics Association announce 2014 TFCA award winners

Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s era-spanning look at a Texas kid’s life from his first week of school to his first week of college, has won three top prizes at the 2014 awards of the Toronto Film Critics Association.

In addition to the film’s Best Picture award, Linklater has won Best Director, and Patricia Arquette has been named Best Supporting Actress for her role as the young protagonist’s mother.

The awards were voted by the TFCA at a meeting on the afternoon of December 14. The membership also named its three finalists for the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award Enemy, directed by Denis Villeneuve; The F Word, directed by Michael Dowse; and Mommy, directed by Xavier Dolan.

The 2014 Joe Fresh Allan King Documentary Award is given to The Overnighters; director Jesse Moss will receive a $5,000 cash prize. Albert Shin, director of the South Korean domestic drama In Her Place, was named the winner of the Scotiabank Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist. He will be presented with a $5,000 cheque at the TFCA’s awards gala on January 6th.

At the gala, the TFCA will also announce the winner of the Manulife Student Film Award, which carries a $5,000 cash prize. It will be presented to a short film that the critics select from student entries submitted by film programs at Humber College, Ryerson University, Sheridan College and York University.

As previously announced, the 2014 recipient of the Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award is Piers Handling, who will present a filmmaker of his choice with $50,000 worth of services from Technicolor at the January 6 gala.

The 2014 TFCA Awards will be presented at a gala dinner at Toronto’s The Carlu on Tuesday, January 6, 2015, hosted by Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director of the Toronto International Film Festival. There the TFCA will also reveal the winner of the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, which carries a record-setting $100,000 cash prize, the richest film award in the country. The runners-up will each receive $5,000.

“In an exceptional year for Canadian cinema, we’ve chosen three boldly directed films that are so dissimilar it’s almost hard to believe they’re set in the same country,” said TFCA President Brian D. Johnson. “Enemy’s austere psychodrama portrays Toronto as a smog-lined tomb of condos and concrete, while The F Word makes the city a bright, airy playground for an agile romantic comedy. And in Mommy a drama of mental illness and parental anguish rips through a household in working-class Montreal.”

The full details of the 18th annual TFCA awards are as follows:

Best Film
Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a cinematic masterpiece that evokes beauty in life and the inevitable passage of time

Best Director
Richard Linklater, for the singular achievement that is Boyhood

Best Actor
Tom Hardy, for playing a Welsh builder in crisis in Locke

Best Actress
Marion Cotillard, for her performance as a Polish woman navigating 1920s America in The Immigrant

Best Supporting Actor
J.K. Simmons, for his role as a tyrannical conductor in Whiplash

Best Supporting Actress
Patricia Arquette, for her role as the mother of Mason Jr. in Boyhood

Best Screenplay
The Grand Budapest Hotel, for its nuanced humour and intricate narrative dollhouse

Best Animated Feature
Isao Takahata’s delicate fable The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Best First Feature
Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox

Best Foreign-Language Film
Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure

Best Documentary Film
Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters