New York, Jan 05: Director Roman Polanski's Holocaust drama The Pianist claimed four awards including best picture and best director from The National Society of Critics on Saturday as the movie industry heads toward its top awards, the Oscars, in March. The influential critics group also named the film's star, Adrien Brody, who portrays a Jewish pianist in Warsaw who escapes the Nazi death camps during World War II, as the year's best actor and gave Pianist writer Ronald Harwood the honor for top screenplay.
Diane Lane, who plays an adulterous wife in Unfaithful, claimed the award for best actress of the year.

The 55 members of the New York-based National Society of Film Critics write for many of the United States' major newspapers and magazines, and it and other critics' groups often help narrow the list of possible nominees for Oscars.
The Oscars, or Academy Awards, are the US film industry's top honors handed out each year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, based in Los Angeles.
Runner-up to Pianist in the best film category was Mexico's Y Tu Mama Tambien, a coming of age story of two boys on a road trip with an older woman, and behind that was Spain's Talk to Her, an offbeat drama from Spanish director Pedro Almodovar that looks at how people communicate. Bureau Report