David Cronenberg’s thrilling drama A History Of Violence has been named best picture of 2005 by the Toronto Film Critics Association.

Cronenberg also grabbed the best director prize and earned the citation for best Canadian film. The results of voting were announced today, putting Toronto’s group at odds with critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles, which both named Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain as best picture.

“This year has turned out to be an extremely and surprisingly rich year in terms of the quality of the films that have come out, including films at all budget levels,” Cronenberg told the TFCA yesterday when informed of the awards.

“And, so, it is particularly gratifying to be recognized this way, especially since I know that the Toronto critics are not shy when it comes to letting you know what they think, positively or negatively. So I take it very seriously — and I am very pleased.”

Cronenberg is the second Toronto filmmaker to do triple duty in same key categories in the TFCA Awards. In 1997, the year the association launched its awards, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter took the same three prizes.

The only wrinkle this year is that the Canadian status of A History Of Violence is a matter of interpretation. It was funded by New Line Cinema in Hollywood, making it an official American production. But Cronenberg shot it in Toronto with his core crew members, bringing a Canadian sensibility to the story of violence in a small American town.

The film was also included in Canada’s Top Ten this year, after the jury organized by the Toronto International Film Festival Group decided to include it as a Canadian entry. At the Cannes and Toronto film festivals, it was talked up as a Canadian film. But it will not be eligible in the Genies.

A History Of Violence, starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris and William Hurt in a story that examines the different faces of violence, has also been praised for its stellar acting. But it was shut out in the four acting categories by the TFCA, with three other films being honoured.

Philip Seymour Hoffman won as best actor for his title role in Capote while Laura Linney won as best actress for her role as the unfaithful wife in The Squid And The Whale. Paul Giamatti won as best supporting actor for playing Russell Crowe’s manager-trainer in Cinderella Man while Catherine Keener made Capote the double winner by taking the award for best supporting actress.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach won the best screenplay prize for The Squid And The Whale while Bennett Miller took the best first feature award for directing Capote.

Nick Park and Steve Box’s marvellous claymation adventure movie, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, was named best animated feature.

In other awards, Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia’s The World was cited as best foreign language film; and Werner Herzog’s haunting Grizzly Man, the tragic story of an obsessive American who devoted himself to protecting grizzly bears in Alaska before one rogue animal killed and ate him and his girlfriend, won as best documentary feature.

The TFCA members also voted to honour British actor Andy Serkis with a special citation “for his unprecedented work helping to realize the main character in King Kong.” Serkis performed as Kong using computerized motion capture to give the beast a dynamic, human-like personality.

The Clyde Gilmour Award, named for the late journalist who pioneered popular film criticism in Canada, goes to Robin Wood. As a film historian, author and academic, Wood was named for his “essential contributions” to the understanding of film as an art form and as a social and political force.

The Toronto Film Critics Association is made up of film critics representing a cross-section of Toronto’s media.