Showbiz History: Shrinking Women, Sundance Hits, and City Lights

7 random things that happened on this day, January 30th, in showbiz history

1931 City Lights premieres in Los Angeles. Albert Einstein, pictured above with Chaplin, was the guest of honor. It was a silent film released well past the point when that was fashionable (sound took over very quickly in one of Hollywood's most titanic upheavals) but it proved a success in theaters...

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Sundance: Rita Moreno in the Spotlight

By Abe Friedtanzer 

In a week where we’ve lost both Cicely Tyson and Cloris Leachman, it feels like the right time to celebrate trailblazing actresses who are still earning awards love well into their eighties and nineties. On tap at Sundance in the U.S. Documentary Competition section is Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It. This exploration of her life and the profound influence she has had on so many is a rich, endearing journey that constitutes a truly delightful and energizing look at a remarkable actress who just last week earned her fourth consecutive Critics Choice nomination at the age of eighty-nine.

This film should work equally well for those intimately familiar with much of Moreno’s resumé as well as those who know her only from her signature film role that won her an Oscar, 1961’s West Side Story, or from the great TV work she’s still doing on the recently-wrapped One Day at a Time...

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Review: The Little Things

by Matt St Clair

A movie like The Little Things probably would’ve done very well in the 90’s. A time when crime thrillers such as Se7en, and another Denzel Washington starrer The Pelican Brief, could thrive financially and when actors rather than superheroes were bonafide box office draws. Given how Denzel is one of the few A-listers left who can open a movie on his name alone, The Little Things might've made a decent profit in a pre-COVID world. Yet, given the film’s poor and dated quality, it would’ve been best to let it live in the past.

Once Kern County Deputy Sheriff Joe Deacon (Denzel Washington) teams with LA detective Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) to help him solve a string of serial killings...

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Sundance: "The Most Beautiful Boy in the World" review

by Jason Adams

"In all the world there is no impurity so impure as old age." -- Death in Venice

The director Luchino Visconti was 64-years-young when he directed his rumination on youth and beauty seen from the opposite end of life. Death in Venice saw Dirk Bogarde vacationing in a plague-riddled seaside hotel where a teen-boy called Tadzio (Björn Andrésen) suddenly sends his overheated brain reeling across platonically idyllic places. And now here 50 years later, premiering at Sundance, comes the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, which turns around and gives us Tadzio's perspective looking back. The sun doesn't shine as brightly from that direction...

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Sundance: "Human Factors" review

by Jason Adams

How weird are those first moments when we realize our parents are people? Not super-humans, not saints, not actually the best baker of cakes or baseball player in the world — when the freckles on their fingers come into focus; the scabs and flabby knees. Mom stares at the wall for too long; Dad knee shakes when he’s trapped in thought. This disillusionment of experience, of aging, rides hand in hand with the becoming of our own selves — their armor dissolves down in order to make us stand stronger, separate.

There is an inciting incident at the near-start of Ronny Trocker’s strategically incisive Human Factors that seems to set the white upper-middle-class family unit at its center spinning of their axis...

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