The Brutalist and Adrien Brody among New York Film Critics Circle Awards winners

Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half hour post-war epic The Brutalist has won best film from the New York Film Critics Circle, while its lead Adrien Brody won best actor.

The win notches an early awards season victory for one of autumn’s most-talked about films.

The Brutalist, which A24 will release on December 20, stars Brody as Laszlo Toth, a visionary Hungarian Jewish architect who flees Second World War Budapest for America.

Fresh off winning two awards at Monday evening’s Gotham Awards, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys picked up another pair of honours.

Ross won for directing and the film’s director of photography, Jomo Fray, took best cinematography honours.

Nickel Boys, which opens next week, is shot largely from a first-person perspective in telling the story, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel, of two black teenagers at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

The critics group, which last year awarded Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon best film, will hand out awards in a ceremony on January 8.