​The big news to emerge from yesterday's New York Film Critics Circle voting--held early this year to scoop the other year end awards--is, of course, the second coming of homeboy Harvey Weinstein.

Not only was The Artist voted best picture and its director Michel Hazanavicius anointed Best Director but NYFCC perennial Meryl Streep, who stars as Margaret Thatcher in the Weinstein Company's yet to be released Iron Lady, won an easy first ballot victory over Michelle Williams (star of another Weinstein release My Week with Marilyn) and Kirsten Dunst, who won an award at Cannes for her performance in Lars von Trier's Melancholia.

After the jump, more inside baseball from the voting...

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​George Kuchar, the Bronx-raised filmmaker who began his career, along with twin brother Mike, at age 12, died this week in San Francisco after a long battle with prostate cancer.

Beginning with The Wet Destruction of the Atlantic Empire (1954) and continuing through The Naked and the Nude (1957), I Was a Teenaged Rumpot (1960), and beyond, George and Mike's 8mm juvenilia broke new ground in cinematic hysteria. Featuring the brother's friends and neighbors ("They were fat but they wanted to be Marilyn Monroe," Mike once said), these largely improvised comedies anticipated the ridiculous theater of the mid '60s, using Hollywood clichés to (barely) channel their makers' adolescent ids. Accompanied by taped soundtracks of hot mambos and florid dialogue, the Kuchars' steamy, hyperbolic melodramas (Tennessee Williams directed by Douglas Sirk for Betty Boop) played out in a distinctive atmosphere of grotesque violence, sexual frenzy, simulated natural disaster and rooftop vistas of the Jerome Avenue El. "It has to be a Reader's Digest condensation of a Hollywood life," George once explained.

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​One of the most innovative and prolific narrative filmmakers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Chilean-born, Paris-based director Raul Ruiz died today in Paris of a pulmonary infection.

Ruiz wrote and directed well over a hundred features and TV mini-series in Chile (from which he exiled himself after the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende), France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United States, including The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979), Treasure Island (1985), Life is a Dream (1986), and a brilliant 1999 adaptation of Proust's Time Regained.

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Breer

​A pioneering kinetic sculptor, a key member of the great generation of American avant-garde filmmakers, and one of the most influential animators in cinema history, Robert Breer died last Thursday at age 84.

Trained as an engineer before he became a painter, Breer spent much of the 1950s in Paris and originally employed 16mm film as way of making visual notes. Upon his return to New York City, he became active in the overlapped worlds of happenings, underground movies, and multi-media performances. (Among other things he documented Jean Tinguely's self-destroying machine "Homage to New York.") Where Breer's early '60s films were largely cut-and-paste collage animations, he turned towards more reductive, geometric abstractions by the decade's close; his late films tended towards an anecdotal, stream-of-consciousness flow of imagery.

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​The New York film community was shocked and saddened this past weekend upon receiving news that Robert Sklar, longtime pillar of NYU's Department of Cinema Studies, had died of injuries suffered in a cycling accident while vacationing in Spain.

Distinguished as he was, Bob Sklar was less ivory tower academic than people's historian who never lost his passion for that which was happening now.

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​A discerning film distributor and a passionate cinephile, Kino International president Donald Krim died of cancer last Friday at the age 65. The news reached many who knew him during the award presentation Sunday night at the Cannes Film Festival when the Israeli director Joseph Cedar, whose Oscar-winning Beaufort was distributed by Kino International, dedicated his prize for best screenplay for his latest film to Don's memory--an appropriate recognition of the man's own, unwavering personal loyalty to and support for the films and filmmakers he distributed.

I began reviewing regularly for the Voice around the time Don acquired Kino International in 1978 and had many opportunities over the years to appreciate his acumen and willingness to take risks.

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Jafar Panahi

​Ten months after his arrest last March, Jafar Panahi -- the most internationally acclaimed of Iranian directors as well as one of the most political in both his movies and his outspoken support for opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi -- has been sentenced to 6 years in prison. In addition, Panahi, 50, has been banned from making movies, talking to local or foreign journalists, and traveling abroad for 20 years. A second filmmaker, Mohammad Rasoulof, maker of the vivid allegory Iron Island (2005), was similarly sentenced. Their crime, according to his lawyer Farideh Gheyrat, was making "propaganda against the system."

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​One of the key members of French new wave, Claude Chabrol died this weekend at age 80, having made nearly as many movies -- almost all of them thrillers -- as years he lived.

Like his colleagues Francoise Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer, Chabrol was a film critic before he was a filmmaker, with a keen and then radical appreciation for American genre films. Presciently hailing Robert Aldrich's 1955 Kiss Me Deadly (a movie so outré the New York Times declined to review it) as "the thriller of tomorrow," Chabrol informed the readers of Cahiers du cinéma, that Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides had taken "the most deplorable, the most nauseous product of a genre in a state of putrefaction: A Mickey Spillane story" and "splendidly rewoven it into rich patterns of the most enigmatic arabesques." Together with Rohmer, Chabrol published the first serious book on Alfred Hitchcock in 1957 and he would remain a life-long Hitchcockian.

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​Back from the Lido, I learned that Somewhere, Sofia Coppola's slight, stringent, not-quite sentimental tale of a movie star on the edge of a nervous breakdown and the 11-year-old daughter that loves him, had won the Golden Lion at the 67th Venice Film Festival--the "unanimous choice" per jury president Quentin Tarantino.

I was rooting for the festival's other American indie, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (in which, not a celeb but a wagon train of western settlers find themselves lost) to pull off an upset; I also imagined that a Tarantino-led jury, which also included French director Arnaud Desplechin, might decide to anoint Hong Kong veteran Tsui Hark for his enjoyably outré historical pageant, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Still, I can't say that the choice of Somewhere came as a surprise.

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From Meek's Cutoff

​Midway through the Venice film festival, the competition is notable for a pair of features by American women: Sofia Coppola's Somewhere and Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff -- both minimalist, open-ended exercises in myths debunked and protagonists lost.

Evidently inspired by the filmmaker's childhood, Somewhere revisits the Lost in Translation scenario (and ups its Oedipal ante) with an innocent 11-year-old girl (Elle Fanning) visiting her wildly successful and miserably lonely film star father (masterfully under-acted by Stephen Dorff) in his Chateau Marmont digs.

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