The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has chosen Philip Kaufman as the recipient of this year’s Career Achievement Award.
LAFCA’s awards honoring the year’s best achievements in filmmaking will be decided by the membership on Sunday, December 7. Those winners will be honored alongside Kaufman at the organization’s awards event to be held Saturday, January 10, 2026, at the Biltmore Hotel.
“Intrepid doesn’t even begin to describe a director who, among his many considerable achievements, gave Indiana Jones his first assignment and inspired the NC-17 rating,” said LAFCA president Robert Abele. “A criminally underappreciated director, Philip Kaufman could never be pigeonholed, from his early days absorbing the independent spirit of homegrown DIY-ers and the European New Wave, to his cool, vivid command of genre in the ’70s, followed by a handful of uncompromising historical epics, including The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that belied anybody’s notion that American filmmakers couldn’t be versatile, intelligent and entertaining about big ideas. The L.A. Film Critics Association is immensely proud to be honoring this dyed-in-the-wool iconoclast.”
“I had just awakened from a Sunday nap and was lying in bed watching A Streetcar Named Desire on TCM when Robert Abele called to tell me the exciting news that LAFCA had given me their Career Achievement Award,” said Kaufman. “And I was suddenly struck by the realization that I have always depended on the kindness of strangers who were critics–and that some of the sweetest things that ever happened to me occurred while I was in bed.”
Chicago-born and Harvard-educated, Kaufman was drawn to cinema’s power by the European masterworks he saw while traveling as a young man, but also by what John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke were boldly making outside the studio system. His offbeat debut, Goldstein (1964), earned praise from the likes of Jean Renoir and François Truffaut. Forging a career in the New Hollywood of the ’70s, Kaufman directed the revisionist western The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) and the Arctic survival drama The White Dawn (1974), and co-wrote The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). His inventive, Bay Area-set freakout redo of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is both pointed generational commentary and a timeless sci-fi horror classic.
In the ’80s, when blockbusters reigned (one of which, Raiders of the Lost Ark, he co-conceived with George Lucas), Kaufman hit his stride as an artistically minded, big-canvas storyteller unafraid to prioritize intimacy, mood and psychological insight, who was fascinated by tales driven by personal freedom. His visually stunning astronaut saga The Right Stuff (1983), epic and experimental, launching a half-dozen or so acting careers, seemed a holdover from the previous decade’s bravery of intent, and showed a new way to examine American myths. He followed that with his masterfully fleet, sexy and captivating 1988 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” which gave another great up-and-coming actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, his first notable starring role. The erotic biography Henry & June (1990), which he wrote with his wife Rose, and the witty, evocative Quills (2000) were further proof that Kaufman never shied from the unfilmable or controversial.
LAFCA will celebrate Kaufman’s 2026 Career Achievement award with a screening of Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the Egyptian Theatre on Monday, November 10, as a part of the “LAFCA at the Egyptian” screening series. Kaufman will appear in person in conversation with LAFCA’s Abele.
