"There Will be Blood" wins top critics' awards (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - "There Will Be Blood" took top honorsfrom the National Society of Film Critics on Saturday, scoringwins for best picture, best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and bestdirector for Paul Thomas Anderson.

The strong showing by "There Will be Blood," a grim tale ofpower, corruption and greed surrounding an early 20th-centuryoil prospector (Day-Lewis), put the epic drama in solidcontention for next month's Oscars.

The movie by Anderson, renowned for such offbeat fare as"Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," was his loose adaptation of a1927 Upton Sinclair novel, "Oil!"

Julie Christie was named best actress by the critics'association for her role as a woman struggling with Alzheimer'sdisease in "Away From Her."

With the win, Christie added to a list of prizes thatposition her as a front-runner for the best-actress Oscar. Shealready has been cited by several well-known groups, includingthe National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, and nominatedfor best actress by the Screen Actors Guild among others.

The National Society of Film Critics includes 61 membersfrom major newspapers in Los Angeles, Boston, New York andChicago as well as from Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker and.

Critics' awards are important in helping build momentumheading toward the Academy Awards, or Oscars, which are theworld's top film awards given out on the final Sunday inFebruary by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Honors for best supporting performances went to CaseyAffleck for the biopic "The Assassination of Jesse James by theCoward Robert Ford," and Cate Blanchett in a gender-bendingperformance as one of six characters embodying an aspect ofmusician Bob Dylan's life and work in "I'm Not There."

The award for best foreign language film was won byRomania's "Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days," about awoman's attempts to secure an illegal abortion. The film alsowon the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The film critics, in their 42nd annual awards, named "NoEnd in Sight," the documentary about the Bush administration'spolicies in Iraq and the war there, as the year's bestnonfiction film.

Shut out of the awards were highly touted films including"Sweeney Todd" and the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men"that won several prizes in the award season's early weeks.

Tamara Jenkins won best screenplay for "The Savages," acomic drama she also directed, starring Laura Linney and PhilipSeymour Hoffman as siblings coping with their ailing father.

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Peter Cooney)