Cate Blanchett won best actress for her role as a deeply-troubled socialite in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.

Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers’ tale of a struggling folk singer in early 1960s Greenwich Village, was named the year’s best film by the National Society of Film Critics, with star Oscar Isaac winning best actor and the film-making brothers sharing the award for best director.

The group, made up of 56 prominent movie critics from newspapers, magazines and other media outlets nationwide, chose Cate Blanchett as best actress for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, in which she plays the troubled wife of a financial fraudster.

Best supporting actress went to Jennifer Lawrence for the 1970s-set American Hustle, and James Franco won best supporting actor for his portrayal of a gangster drug dealer in the comic drama Spring Breakers.

Jennifer Lawrence won the best actress for her role in the 1970s crime caper American Hustle.

In choosing Inside Llewyn Davis, the critics broke away from choices by other groups such as the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle, which respectively chose the quirky Her and American Hustle as best film. Earlier last week, the Producers Guild left the well-reviewed film off its list of nominees for the year’s best film.

In the film, which also won the critics’ prize for best cinematography and also stars Carey Mulligan, Isaac plays the title character Llewyn Davis, a folk musician on a week-long odyssey set against a musical score of T-Bone Burnett.

The film was chosen as the year’s best by the Boston Society of Film Critics and is nominated for several Golden Globe awards, including best musical or comedy.

The critics awards are among the last in the run-up to the Oscar nominations, to be announced on January 16 in Los Angeles. The Academy Awards ceremony is slated for March 2.

Joel and Ethan Coen are a film-making team known for producing, writing and directing movies from their 1984 debut Blood Simple, Fargo and True Grit to their Oscar winning best picture, No Country For Old Men.

The Act of Killing, about septuagenarian Indonesian mass murderer Anwar Congo, in which Indonesian gangsters re-enact killings they participated in during the mid-1960s anti-Communist purge, shared the prize with At Berkeley, Frederick Wiseman’s look at the northern California university.

In choosing Inside Llewyn Davis, the critics broke away from choices by other groups such as the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle

Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke shared the best screenplay prize for Before Midnight, the third film in the romantic series starring Delpy and Hawke.

Leviathan took the experimental film prize. Special film heritage honours went to the Museum of Modern Art, the British Film Institute, the DVD American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive, and Too Much Johnson, the surviving reels of Orson Welles’s debut film which were discovered by Cinemazero (Pordenone) and Cineteca del Friuli, funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation and restored by the George Eastman House.