The film "Away from Her" was the big winner on Monday night at Canada's Genie Awards, winning seven statuettes, including best picture, best actor, best actress and best director for first-time filmmaker Sarah Polley.

Polley, 29, a longtime darling in the Canadian acting scene, also took home a Genie statuette for best adapted screenplay and won the Claude Jutra Award, recognizing outstanding achievement by a first-time feature film director.

"The ridiculousness of me winning this award is not lost on me ... this is totally absurd but thanks," said a humbled Polley after accepting the award for best director.

Gordon Pinsent took home the best actor award for his role as a man trying to cope with the institutionalization of his wife due to Alzheimer's disease in "Away From Me."

Pinsent's on-screen partner, Julie Christie, won for best actress, and Kristen Thomson won for best supporting actress.

Director David Cronenberg's dark Russian mob film, "Eastern Promises," also took home seven awards, including best supporting actor for Armin Mueller-Stahl and best original screenplay for Steve Knight.

Two words heard often during the evening were "Kill bill," followed by "C10."

The caper film is such a time-honored and recently neglected genre that it's a shame to report that Roger Donaldson's "The Bank Job" isn't better than it is.

Loosely based on the true-life 1971 robbery of a Lloyds Bank in a ritzy section of London, "Bank" is a slow-paced and often confusingly plotted crime drama that never lives up to the delicious potential of its premise.

The heist's central figure is Terry (Jason Statham, working in a less physically demanding mode than usual), a small-time car dealer and petty criminal who is propositioned to do the job by his old flame Martine (Saffron Burrows). Although she promises a roomful of safe deposit boxes containing untold millions in cash and jewelry, it turns out that her motivations aren't financial. She's being pressured by the British spy forces, who are determined to procure sexually incriminating photos of a member of the royal family that are being used for blackmail purposes by a drug-dealing revolutionary (Peter De Jersey).

Although the robbery is successful, Terry and his makeshift gang suddenly find themselves being pursued not only by the agents of M15 or M16 -- no one is really quite sure which -- but also by a ruthless gangster (David Suchet) looking to retrieve a ledger detailing his payoffs to the local police.

The screenplay by the veteran team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais ("The Commitments") doesn't succeed in conveying the complicated scenario in fully coherent fashion, and Donaldson's tonally wobbly direction is atypically unsure. The proceedings never achieve the necessary tension or pacing, and the half-hearted attempts at comic relief mainly fall flat.