Film critics and filmmakers don’t always mix and mingle, but when they do it’s often at the New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony. The 2026 edition of the annual event — a now-regular stop on the pre-Oscar January awards circuit — took place on Jan. 6 in downtown Manhattan with such contenders as Rose Byrne, Benicio Del Toro, Amy Madigan and Wagner Moura in attendance.
No surprises were in store for the evening, as the NYFCC already unveiled their winners back in December. The organization identified Byrne and Moura as 2025’s Best Actress and Best Actor for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and The Secret Agent, respectively, while Madigan and Del Toro won the equivalent supporting awards for Weapons and One Battle After Another. That Paul Thomas Anderson-directed feature was also the NYFCC’s pick for Best Film, while Jafar Panahi was recognized as Best Director for It Was Just an Accident and KPop Demon Hunters continued its golden streak with another Best Animated Feature victory.
In his opening remarks, current NYFCC Chair David Ehrlich addressed the elephant in the room, namely the idea of critics and talent occupying the same space — something that Peter Venkman might identify as a cause for mass hysteria. “That film critics and filmmakers depend on each other is self-evident,” noted the Indiewire critic, adding that they both come together to “inspire generations of dreamers” to follow a passion for film.
Here are some of the night’s most memorable moments.
One Benicio after another
Accepting his award for playing One Battle After Another’s ultra-wise, ultra-crafty sensei, Del Toro revealed that he came very close to not being part of the cast. “There were many obstacles with the schedule where it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to be part of [the film],” he said, crediting the movie’s producers as well as costar Leonardo DiCaprio. “But there were a lot of people that were very persistent and they felt that Sensei had to come from me. They fought very hard to create time so that I could be in the movie.”
Del Toro also paid tribute to Anderson, whom the actor previously worked with on 2014’s Inherent Vice, another Thomas Pynchon adaptation. “[My character] has the ability to put himself in other peoples’ boots while doing everything from the heart without asking for anything in return — that’s Sensei and it’s all thanks to Paul.”
Desirable friends
Some of the loudest applause of the evening accompanied the introduction of Russian dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was on hand to present the prize for Best Nonfiction Film to the makers of My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow. Julia Loktev’s three-hour documentary chronicles the challenging task that independent Russian journalists face reporting in a country where the media is controlled by the state and its leader, Vladimir Putin. “It is rare to have a front-row seat as an authoritarian government dismantles what’s left of its press,” said Baryshnikov, who defected from the former Soviet Union in the 1970s. “[The filmmakers] have created a stunning document about the extraordinary bravery of living an ordinary life in Putin’s Russia.”
After being handed her award, Loktev couldn’t resist taking a moment to fan out over the celebrity presenter. “This is the proudest my mom has been of me,” she joked, before pivoting to a more more somber note by addressing the timeliness of her documentary in both Putin’s Russia and America under President Donald Trump. “I thought this was a film about very far-away Russia; I didn’t expect it to feel so close.”
More Moura
Lupita Nyong’o met Wagner Moura for the first time literally moments before she stepped onstage to present him with his Best Actor prize. But the Oscar winner told the audience that she happily made time in her schedule to be a presenter after watching The Secret Agent a month ago. “[His performance] is extraordinary to me,” Nyong’o remarked. “Through quiet resilience and beautiful subtlety, he illuminates what it means to embrace our history.”
Moura was then given a hero’s welcome by the audience, a clear reflection of his surging Best Actor prospects in the Oscar race. “Kleber Mendonça Filho used to be a critic like yourselves — a very mean one,” the Brazilian actor joked of The Secret Agent’s director’s former life as a film reviewer. “He wrote very nasty reviews of films that I’ve done.” Fortunately, Filho’s first feature film impressed Moura enough to put his memories of those notices aside. “What brought us together was politics… what was going on in Brazil from 2018 to 2022,” he explained, referring to the now-ended rule of former president, Jair Bolsonaro. “I’m obliged to our former fascist president, because without him, we wouldn’t have done this film!”
Ping-pong supremacy
When Gen Z and Gen A turn ping-pong into the next major global sports phenomenon, we’ll have Marty Supreme to thank. And that was director Josh Safdie’s master plan all along. Accepting the NYFCC award for Best Screenplay along his cowriter, Ronald Bronstein, the New York-born and bred filmmaker recalled how he first pitched the idea for the Timothée Chalamet-led movie to his collaborator. “Six years ago, I barged into our office, looked at Ronnie and said, ‘We’re going to make a movie about the world’s greatest table tennis player.’ He was like, ‘Ping-pong? We’re going to make a movie about a ping-pong player?'”
“Ping-pong is designed to ridicule anyone who believes in it,” Safdie continued. “And right there, him s–ting on the dream is the kind of origins of this project. And that’s also the process of directing — it’s constantly about how to transfer the enthusiasm. This movie is very much about dreams and how the world does not want your dream to exist. We wrote the film as a heist movie … about trying to control your own fate. That was our guiding principle.”