Toronto critics award The Master

The Toronto Film Critics Association (TFCA) has named Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master the best film of 2012.

Anderson’s drama following the relationship between a War veteran and a cult leader won four awards in total, taking home Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman winning Best Supporting Actor. The director has now won Best Director three times and Best Picture twice.

Denis Lavant and Rachel Weisz won Best Actor and Best Actress for their roles in Holy Motors and The Deep Blue Sea, respectively. Chris Butler and Sam Fell’s ParaNorman won Best Animated Feature, while Gina Gershon was named Best Supporting Actress for Killer Joe.

Michael Haneke’s Amour was awarded Best Foreign-Language Film, while Best First Feature was shared between Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The TFCA also unveiled the three finalists for the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, to be announced at a gala dinner at Toronto’s Carlu on Jan 8, hosted by Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival: Bestiaire, directed by Denis Côté; Goon, directed by Michael Dowse, and Stories We Tell, directed by Sarah Polley. Polley’s documentary also won the Allan King Documentary Award.

“The diversity of our three finalists for this extraordinary new prize show there’s nothing predictable about Canadian cinema,” commented TFCA President Brian D. Johnson, film critic for Maclean’s.

He continued: “These are all genres we haven’t seen before. Bestiaire is a visionary documentary from Montreal that explores our relationship to the animal world. Stories We Tell, a doc from Toronto, unfolds as a procedural home movie, investigating the filmmaker’s family secrets; and Goon, shot largely in Winnipeg and set across the country, is a viciously funny comedy about hockey violence.”