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Between 1948 and 1983 Golden Globes were awarded in a special category of “New Star of the Year” conceived to recognize young actors making a mark in their early roles. In this series, the HFPA’s Phil Berk highlights those that would follow their auspicious starts with distinguished careers.

A hopeful and inspiring reflection on the real-life hardships faced by a young transgender woman seeking to embrace who she is, Valentina marks the feature film debut of Brazilian writer-director Cássio Pereira dos Santos. The film follows Valentina, a seventeen-year-old girl who moves to the countryside of Brazil with her mother, Márcia (played by renowned actress Guta Stresser), for a fresh start.

There is no way around learning about Kyrgyzstan without learning about Issyk-Kul, the largest lake in this Central Asian country.  Surrounded by the snow-capped mountains of Tian Shan, it never freezes, that is why it was named “warm lake” by Kyrgyz ancestors.

Historical dramas and serial killer thrillers typically conjure their own set of cinematic tropes. But the sneakily ambitious Effigy: Poison and the City unfolds against these shared backdrops in an intriguing manner.

The Garden Court Apartments, at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard, are long gone, replaced by an ugly mini-mall with a drugstore, a fitness club, and a Fresh and Easy supermarket. Mack Sennett used to live there, just opposite the still standing Roosevelt Hotel when it was a fancy address.

There are so many iconic images of legendary actress Audrey Hepburn: sitting on her New York balcony, strumming the guitar as she croons “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, riding her Vespa through the streets of Rome in Roman Holiday, dancing through Paris with Fred Astaire in Funny Face. Born in Ixelles, Belgium, Audrey Kathleen Ruston, as she was known, grew up in the throes of World War II, in desperate poverty and the product of a broken home.

The closing credits, featuring some of the names of the filmmakers juxtaposed on a cave wall, beneath the sound of a crackling fire, speak in a powerfully direct and simple way to the need for storytelling, which is long hardwired into mankind. So, is this director Rodney Ascher’s sly way of acknowledging that his latest film, A Glitch in the Matrix, is itself an exercise in flamboyant narrative indulgence, despite its nonfiction roots? If so, it’s perhaps too cute by half, but also emblematic of the fitful engagement of this intellectually playful yet ultimately frustrating documentary, which unfolds as a mixture of epistemological surveying and philosophical spitballing.

Cloris Leachman, whose acting career spanned eight decades, has died of natural causes, age 94. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for acting in motion pictures, and lost, three years in a row, but won the fourth time, as Best Actress in a Television Series, Comedy or Musical for her lead performance in Phyllis (1975).

It’s The Little Things that count at the box office. The crime-thriller-drama, starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto, landed at number one in the U.

The Auschwitz Report is based on the true story of German documents smuggled out of the titular concentration camp in April 1944, which proved the horrifying scale of the Third Reich’s attempted “Final Solution. ” At the movie’s center is Noel Czuczor, who stars as Alfréd Wetzler, one of two men who, after more than a full year of meticulous escape planning, set off on a treacherous journey through mountains and underground tunnels.