Toronto film critics are ride-or-die for Nomadland

February 8, 2021Norman Wilner

A lone woman in a white panel van has driven off with this year’s Toronto Film Critics Association awards.

The TFCA named Nomadland – which stars Frances McDormand as a widow who becomes part of a community that moves around the American southwest chasing seasonal employment – the best picture of 2020. Chloé Zhao also won best director, while McDormand was named best actress.

This marks McDormand’s second time winning the TFCA’s acting prize; she’d previously been honoured for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2017.

The TFCA – which includes the NOW film team among its membership – determined its winners over the course of a four-hour live vote (conducted virtually) Sunday afternoon.

Also announced were the finalists for this year’s Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, which carries a $100,000 cash prize: And The Birds Rained Down, a late-life drama directed by Louise Archambault; Anne At 13,000 Ft., a character study from Kazik Radwanski; and the psychological thriller White Lie, directed by Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas. The winning film will be announced at the association’s awards gala next month.

Riz Ahmed was named best actor for his performance as a drummer coping with a devastating hearing loss in Sound Of Metal. Daniel Kaluuya took the best supporting actor prize for his blistering turn as murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Judas And The Black Messiah. And newcomer Maria Bakalova, whose work in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm included getting Rudy Giuliani to fumble with his pants in a New York City hotel room, was named best supporting actress.

Lee Isaac Chung’s tender family drama Minari won best screenplay, while writer/director/star Radha Blank’s Netflix breakout The Forty-Year-Old Version was named best first feature.

Wolfwalkers, a medieval fable from the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, won best animated feature, while Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s unclassifiable Brazilian action movie Bacurau took best foreign-language film.

The Allan King documentary film award went to Alexander Nanau’s Collective, which unpacks a Romanian health-care scandal from the perspectives of the journalists who reveal it and the untested patients’ advocate appointed to fix it.