Members of the KC movie reviewing community gathered on Sunday, Dec. 16 to vote for the 46th annual Kansas City Film Critics Circle awards.
The Winners:
Best Film: “THE MASTER”
Best Director: Ang Lee “THE LIFE OF PI”
Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence “SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK”
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis “LINCOLN”
Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway “LES MISERABLES”
Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman “THE MASTER”
Best Screenplay Adaptation: Chris Terrio “ARGO”
Best Original Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson “THE MASTER”
Best Foreign Film: “AMOUR”
Best Animated Feature: “FRANKENWEENIE”
Best Documentary Feature: “THE IMPOSTER”
Vince Koehler Award for Best Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror Feature: “CABIN IN THE WOODS”
Butler's Cinema Scene 
As always, some provocative and interesting choices. The biggest winner, The Master, is playing at only one theater locally, the Screenland Crown Center.
The Master as Best Film? It’s extraordinarily well-acted…the cinematography is generally excellent…the texture of the time and place is effectively captured…but all of this combines to give us 144 minutes of nicely dressed nothing. There is no story; there is no plot; there is no point. There is only the tango the characters dance, scene after scene — Hoffman & Phoenix taking turns impressing us (and obviously each other) with the subtleties, tics and twitches they have devised to fill the emptiness of the script. They already know what we only realize as the curtain closes. That’s why they keep on dancing…they break out the booze…. they have a ball — for that, my friends, is all there is to this movie.
So yes, we watch this crafted neuroticism, thinking that, maybe, perhaps, just possibly, in this next segment something of consequence will actually happen. But it doesn’t; it never does. The Master, sadly, given the quality of the artists who created it, is nothing more than puff pastry — elegant, pretty, but lacking any semblance of substance. It is a trifle. And it is very definitely not even close to the Best Film of the Year (a vote which, btw, casts an immense shadow over the entirety of the KC Movie Reviewing Community)..