December 21, 2024: A loose adaptation of a Henry James short story took the Florida Film Critics Circle’s top prize in its 2024 awards.

“The Beast,” a visionary, sci-fi tinged portrait of doomed love across three different time periods, won Best Picture. The French-Canadian co-production also nabbed Best Director honors for Bertrand Bonello and Best Actress for Léa Seydoux.

In an unexpected HBO reunion, two stars from the series “Succession” took home acting awards. Kieran Culkin won Best Actor playing Jesse Eisenberg’s ne’er-do-well cousin in “A Real Pain,” also written and directed by Eisenberg, while Jeremy Strong won Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor, in “The Apprentice.”

Zoe Saldaña won Best Supporting Actress for her work in Jacques Audiard’s Cannes winner “Emilia Pérez,” a transgender musical melodrama predominantly set in Mexico, also starring Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz and Édgar Ramírez.

The screenplay awards went to two other acclaimed LGBTQ+ films. Jane Schoenbrun’s horror drama/transgender allegory “I Saw the TV Glow” picked up Best Original Screenplay, while “Queer,” Luca Guadagnino’s take on William S. Burroughs’ novella, landed Justin Kuritzkes the Best Adapted Screenplay Award.

This was the second collaboration between Guadagnino and Kuritzkes after “Challengers,” a romantic drama set in the world of professional tennis, which picked up the Best Original Score Award for composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. 

The Best Ensemble Award went to “Conclave,” a screen adaptation of Robert Harris’ best-selling novel about a papal election from “All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger. The stacked cast, headed by FFCC nominee Ralph Fiennes, includes Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini, Sergio Castellitto, Brian F. O’Byrne and Carlos Diehz.

The only other movie besides “The Beast” to win multiple awards was “Dune: Part Two,” Denis Villeneuve’s continuation of his envisioning of Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel. The eye-popping epic won awards for its visual effects and its art direction/production design.

Nominated in multiple categories, including Best Picture and Best Actor, “The Brutalist,” director Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour period epic about a Hungarian architect who immigrated to the U.S. after surviving the Holocaust, picked up the Best Cinematography award for director of photography Lol Crawley.

Creativity runs high in two of this year’s winners. Best Picture nominee “Hundreds of Beavers,” a cheeky black and white period comedy from director Mike Cheslik, won the Best First Feature Award. The Wisconsin-set indie sensation marries the sensibilities of a silent comedy, a Looney Tunes cartoon and a video game. Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow,”an immersive eco-fable with echoes of Carroll Ballard’s animal adventures, floated off with the Best Animated Feature Award.

Two other Cannes winners emerged victorious. “All We Imagine as Light,” director Payal Kapadia’s quietly devastating portrait of three medical workers in Mumbai, India, won Best International Film, while Mikey Madison, the star of Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anora,” sashayed away with the Breakthrough Performance Award.

Picking up Best Documentary was “Soundtrack to a Coup d’État,” director Johan Grimonprez’s riveting deconstruction of the unusual political machinations behind the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.

Finally, South Florida filmmaker Monica Sorelle was the recipient of this year’s Golden Orange, awarded to outstanding contributions to film by a Floridian, for her debut feature “Mountains,” an absorbing kitchen sink drama about a Haitian American family grappling with gentrification and the generational divide in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood.  

ABOUT FLORIDA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE (FFCC)

Founded in 1996, the Florida Film Critics Circle is an organization of writers from Florida-based print and online publications. The FFCC strives to recognize outstanding work in film, further the cause of good movies, and maintain the highest level of professionalism among film critics in Florida.

BEST PICTURE
Anora
The Beast
The Brutalist
Conclave
Hundreds of Beavers

BEST ACTOR
Adrien Brody (The Brutalist)
Daniel Craig (Queer)
Josh O’Connor (Challengers)
Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain)
Ralph Fiennes (Conclave)

BEST ACTRESS
Carol Kane (Between the Temples)
Léa Seydoux (The Beast)
Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths)
Mikey Madison (Anora)
Nicole Kidman (Babygirl)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Anna Baryshnikov (Love Lies Bleeding)
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Nickel Boys)
Isabella Rosellini (Conclave)
Margaret Qualley (The Substance)
Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Yura Borisov (Anora)
Willem Dafoe (Kinds of Kindness)
Adam Pearson (A Different Man)
Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice)
Denzel Washington (Gladiator II)

BEST ENSEMBLE
All We Imagine As Light
Anora
Conclave
Challengers
Saturday Night

BEST DIRECTOR
Sean Baker (Anora)
Bertrand Bonello (The Beast)
Luca Guadagnino (Challengers)
Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine As Light)
RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Anora (Sean Baker)
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
Challengers (Justin Kuritzkes)
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
I Saw The TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, Benjamin Charbit & Guillaume Bréaud, based on Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle)
Conclave (Peter Straughan, based on Robert Harris’ Conclave)
Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve & Jon Spaihts, based on Frank Herbert’s Dune)
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes, based on Colton Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys)
Queer (Justin Kuritzkes, based on William S. Burroughs’ Queer)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Brutalist (Lol Crawley)
Challengers (Sayombhu Mukdeeprom)
Conclave (Stéphane Fontaine)
Dune: Part Two (Greig Fraser)
Nickel Boys (Jomo Fray)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Dune: Part Two
Hundreds of Beavers
Tuesday
The Substance
Wicked

BEST ART DIRECTION / PRODUCTION DESIGN
The Beast
The Brutalist
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Maria

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
The Brutalist (Daniel Blumberg)
Challengers (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross)
Conclave (Volker Bertelmann)
Dune: Part 2 (Hans Zimmer)
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis & Rihards Zalupe)

BEST DOCUMENTARY
Daughters
No Other Land
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Will & Harper

BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM
All We Imagine as Light
Do Not Expect Too Much from The End of the World
Emilia Pérez
I’m Still Here
The Seed of the Sacred Fig

BEST ANIMATED FILM
The Colors Within
Flow
Inside Out 2
Memoir of a Snail
The Wild Robot

BEST FIRST FEATURE
Hundreds of Beavers
Janet Planet
The People’s Joker
Stress Positions
Tuesday

BREAKOUT PERFORMANCE
Brigette Lundy-Paine (I Saw The TV Glow)
Katy M. O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding)
Mikey Madison (Anora)
Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (Hundreds of Beavers)
Zoe Zigler (Janet Planet)

GOLDEN ORANGE
Mountains (Monica Sorelle)