Yi Yi Surprise Pick for Best of Year

January 8, 2001 -- Consensus among critics' groups for the best film of 2000 is still hard to find, as yet another critics' group weighed in with yet another film as best of the year. The National Society of Film Critics chose Edward Yang's Yi Yi (A One and a Two …), a quiet Taiwanese family drama that some other critics' groups had named as best foreign film.

The runner-up for best film, with approximately half as many votes, was Steven Soderbergh's Traffic.

The 35-year-old society, chaired by New York magazine critic Peter Rainer and comprising 51 critics from around the country, all but ignored mainstream moviemaking efforts and awarded several other top prizes to smaller films and their stars.

You Can Count on Me won two awards, with best actress honors going to Laura Linney and best screenplay to Kenneth Lonergan.

Traffic's Benicio Del Toro was named as best supporting actor, and Steven Soderbergh — one of the few talents critics are agreeing on — was named director of the year for the drug-trade drama and also for Erin Brockovich.

Spanish actor Javier Bardem, whose name also appeared frequently on end-of-year lists, won the award for best actor for his work in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls, and Elaine May took the best supporting actress prize for Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks.

The group did not name a best foreign film of the year, perhaps because its favorite film of the year is a foreign film.

Canadian director Guy Madden won a prize for best experimental film for his short The Heart of the World, which was made as a celebratory pre-feature promo piece for the Toronto Film Festival. The society also granted the National Film Preservation Foundation a Film Heritage Award and presented a special citation to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up, L'Avventura), noting "the exemplary intelligence, creativity, and integrity of his half-century-long career."

Reuters contributed to this story.