New York Critics and Indie Spirits

One Battle, shot for the most part on 35 mm with VistaVision cameras and a budget of around $140 million, has been crowned best film of the year at the Gotham Film Awards and by the New York Film Critics Circle, the staff at IndieWire, and Alissa Wilkinson in the New York Times. Peter Hujar’s Day, shot on Super 16 mm for less than half a million dollars, leads the nominations for the Film Independent Spirit Awards with five.

“One winter day in 1974, New York writer Linda Rosenkrantz—here played by the always-tuned-in actor Rebecca Hall—sat down with her friend, photographer Peter Hujar, to hear him recount every little thing he’d done the previous day,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, who has Sachs’s film at #5 on her top ten. Ben Whishaw, an Indie Spirit nominee for Best Lead Performance, “plays Hujar as a seductive jokester, keyed into both the banality and the cracked glamour of the artist’s life.” Zacharek’s #1 is Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, and she’s got Linklater’s Blue Moon at #3.

Whether or not you agree with novelist Jonathan Lethem’s argument that One Battle, while offering “cineplex joy,” is ultimately a misfire, his piece for the New York Review of Books is an essential read. PTA’s film, “prepared and shot before Trump’s reelection, is something more than prescient; it seems to have won an existential gamble, on a high and devastating level, in staging scenes of a U.S. invasion of its own cities, scenes in which officials with guns occupy high schools and hospitals, all under an official pretext originating in a corrupt and insane commander’s personal vendetta.”

The NYT’s Manohla Dargis has One Battle at #2 on a list of ten topped by Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, “a uniquely American horror story about race and resistance, art and community that’s anchored by twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan) whose world is threatened by white vampirism. As darkness descends, the story’s horizons open to incorporate the sweep of American history, one whose soundtrack is the blues.” Shot by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners has won the NYFCC’s award for Best Cinematography.

Other notable NYFCC awards include Best Director for Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident); Best International Film for Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Best Actor for its star, Wagner Moura; Best Nonfiction film for Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, #3 on Wilkinson’s list and #6 on Dargis’s; Best First Film for Carson Lund’s Eephus, which is up for two Indie Spirit Awards; and Best Screenplay for Marty Supreme, cowritten by Ronald Brownstein and director Josh Safdie. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich finds that Marty Supreme, slated to open on Christmas Day, “suffuses [Timothée] Chalamet’s singular eagerness into a film as propulsive, quicksilver, and electrifying as he is.”

One of the most-anticipated top tens each year—mostly because it’s simply such a fun quick read—comes from John Waters, and Vulture has his 2025 list of favorites. At #1 is Ari Aster’s Eddington, “a disagreeable but highly entertaining tale as exhausting as today’s politics with characters nobody could possibly root for. Yet it’s so terrifyingly funny, so confusingly chaste and kinky that you’ll feel coo-coo crazy and oh-so-cultural after watching. If you don’t like this film, I hate you.”