'Spotlight' Named Best Picture by Vancouver Critics

By Etan Vlessing
Hollywood Reporter
December 21, 2015

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/spotlight-named-best-picture-by-850456

Photo by Kerry Hayes

The Vancouver Film Critics Circle has named Tom McCarthy's fact-based journalism drama Spotlight as the best film of the year.

The fact-based journalism drama inspired by Boston Globe reporters exposing sexual abuse in the Catholic Church beat out Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's survival thriller The Revenant and George Miller's action pic Mad Max: Fury Road in the best film category. 

Spotlight was earlier named best picture by film critics in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Canadian critics also hailed Steve Jobs' Michael Fassbender as best actor and Room star Brie Larson as best actress. And Bridge of Spies' Mark Rylance and Ex Machina's Alicia Vikander won in the supporting acting categories.

Vancouver critics elsewhere named Mad Max: Fury Road's George Miller the best director, and Charlie Kaufman won best screenplay trophy for his stop motion drama Anomalisa.

And Asif Kapadia's Amy was named best documentary, while Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin won in the best foreign language film category. Vancouver film scribes last year named Richard Linklater's Boyhood as the best film of 2014.