Chloe Zhao won Best Director on behalf of her film `Nomadland.` `Never Rarely Sometimes Always` picked up two awards, one for Best Director Eliza Hittman and another for Best Actress Sidney Flanigan. The Brazilian film `Bacurau` won the prize for Best Foreign Language Film. All five films in Steve McQueen's `Small Axe` anthology were honored collectively for Best Cinematography. `Wolfwalkers` won Best Animated Film. Radha Blank's `The Forty Year Old Version` won Best First Film. And the documentary `Time` won Best Non-Fiction Film.
For its Special Awards, the New York Film Critics even took a veiled shot at streaming services like HBO Max, awarding a prize to Kino Lorber for its rollout of the virtual cinema platform Kino Marquee and calling it `a virtual distribution service that was designed to help support movie theaters, not destroy them.` The critics also awarded Spike Lee a special award for `inspiring the New York community with his short film 'New York New York' and for advocating for a better society through cinema.
