International critics have voted Mad Max: Fury Road the best film of the year, their main federation has announced.
A scene from Mad Max: Fury Road Photo: Supplied
The action movie - which was shot by Australian director George Miller - will be awarded the Grand Prix of the International Federation of Film Critics at the San Sebastian film festival in Spain on 18 September.
"You could have knocked me over with a feather! It's lovely to have this great cohort of critics acknowledge our collective labours in this way," Miller said in the statement.
The vote saw 493 of the world's top critics, who typically reward less mainstream arthouse films, choose from among movies premiered after 1 July, 2014.
The finalists were the Chinese martial arts movie The Assassin (Nie yin niang), the harrowing Auschwitz film Son of Saul (Saul fia), The Iranian drama Taxi and Mad Max: Fury Road.
Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, currently has a 97 percent rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website.
The fourth film in the apocalyptic adventure franchise will receive a special screening at the festival, the highest-profile movie event in the Spanish-speaking world, which runs until the end of the month.
Last year's winner of the award was Richard Linklater for Boyhood.
The festival, held each year in San Sebastian, a seaside resort on Spain's northern Atlantic coast, was originally intended to honour Spanish language films but has established itself as one of the most important movie festivals in the world.
It hosted the world premiere of Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller North by Northwest in 1959 and Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda in 2004.
- ABC
