New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) Awards: ‘One Battle After Another’ Named Best Film, Wagner Moura Makes History with Best Actor Win

Coming less than 12 hours after the Gothams awarded One Battle After Another with Best Feature, the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) agreed, awarding the Paul Thomas Anderson epic Best Film of 2025. The film also took the award for Best Supporting Actor with Benicio del Toro’s scene-stealing turn.

Jafar Panahi, who yesterday was both sentenced to one year in prison by an Iranian court and won the Gotham Award for Best Director, repeated that second feat today with another Best Director win for It Was Just an Accident, his Palme d’Or-winner about an Azerbaijani man who thinks he recognizes his former torturer and then kidnaps the man for revenge.

Wagner Moura made history becoming the first Latin actor to win Best Actor from the East Coast org. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Brazilian Cannes winner The Secret Agent was also named Best International Film. Rose Byrne won Best Actress for her portrayal as a therapist and mother on the edge in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Amy Madigan’s awards train pulls into the station with a win for Supporting Actress for her witchy Aunt Gladys in the blockbuster hit Weapons.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow was a surprise Gotham winner last night and triumphed again today with New York in the non-fiction category. The five and a half hour film documents women journalists in Moscow facing government crackdown as Russia invades Ukraine, capturing their fight for speech amid risks of being branded “foreign agents” and the country’s drift towards authoritarianism.

Founded in 1935, the Circle’s membership includes critics from daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, magazines, and qualifying online general-interest publications. Every year in December the organization meets in New York to vote on awards for the previous calendar year’s films.

Since the Oscars’ expansion to 10 nominees in 2009, the only NYFF Best Film winners to miss out on a Best Picture nomination have been Carol (2015) and First Cow (2020) with the latter becoming the first film in the organization’s 90-year history to fail to garner a single Oscar nomination. Last year, the group selected Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist as their top pick, which went on to be nominated for Best Picture and Best Director and win three Oscars, including Best Actor.

Here is the complete list of winners.

BEST FILM: One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

BEST DIRECTOR: Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident

BEST ACTOR: Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

BEST ACTRESS: Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Amy Madigan, Weapons

BEST SCREENPLAY: Marty Supreme

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sinners

BEST FIRST FILM: Eephus (dir. Carson Lund)

BEST ANIMATED FILM: KPop Demon Hunters (dirs. Maggie Kang, Chris Appelhans)

BEST NON-FICTION FILM: My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow (dir. Julia Loktev)

BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM: The Secret Agent (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)

SPECIAL AWARD: Museum of the Moving Image

STUDENT PRIZES: London Xhudo (Undergraduate, NYU) and Tan Zhiyuan (Graduate, The New School)

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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