- China, 1 January: The Kuomintang has set down the first rules for film censorship.
- Hollywood, 2 January: According to an article in Variety, the investment required to equip movie theaters with sound systems will be close to $3 million.
- Berlin, 17 January: An experimental screening of two short sound films was held at the Tauentzienplast.
- Portugal, 23 January: Release of J. Leitao de Barros' film Nazare, Fishermen's Beach.
- Hollywood, 1 February: Erich von Stroheim has run into problems with his latest film, Queen Kelly. Both of the producers, Joseph Kennedy and Gloria Swanson, are shocked by the content of the film, which portrays the seduction of a young convent girl by a libertine prince, and as a consequence have withdrawn their financial backing.
- New York, 2 February:
 "MGM has stolen the march on all their competitors in the talkie production field by being the first on the market with a combination drama and musical revue that will knock the audiences for a goal," trumpeted Motion Picture News a few days ago, before the premiere of The Broadway Melody. That prediction is right on target because audiences have been knocked "for a goal." Not so much by the slight story involving two small-town vaudevillian sisters (Bessie Love and Anita Page) who fall for the same Broadway song 'n' dance man (Charles King), but by the musical numbers. One of the, "The Wedding of the Painted Doll," was filmed in two-strip Technicolor. It is part of the impresario character Francis Zanfield's most recent extravaganza, which contains a string of hits by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, including the title track and the song "You Were Meant for Me." In order to create fluency, the sound engineer Douglas Shearer pre-recorded music then played it through loudspeakers on the set for the performers, so the film could later be married to the recording.
 - Moscow, 18 February: The Commune, cited by Marx and Lenin as an event that influenced their philosophy and eventually the Revolution, has now been used as a subject for a new Russian film. The New Babylon is directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, two young cinéastes, age 24 and 27, respectively. It was they, with a few others, who founded FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) in Petrograd in 1922. They claim to be influenced by music-hall, the circus and Guignol, ignoring psychology and rhetorical gestures. One witnessed this in The Overcoat, a strange fantasy based on Gogol, and in The Club of the Big Deed, a revolutionary drama. Zola would not have repudiated the story of The New Babylon, which tells of Louise (Elena Kuzmina), a sales clerk working in the luxury department store carrying the same name as the film, whose life is changed by external events. Her social situation enables her to link disparate elements -- the workers with whom she lives, the rich whom she serves. She sees the effects of the German advance on Paris on both the cowardly bourgeoisie and the patriotic working class. The film's climax is the collapse of the Commune, though a degree of optimism is provided by the social awareness that Louise's boyfriend discovers in the event. One must salute the camerawork of Andrei Moskvine, which recalls the masterpieces of Renoir, Manet and Daumier, and the brilliant music composed by Dmitri Shostakovich.
- Berlin, 28 February:
 Director G. W. Pabst is never afraid to surprise or to shock. Well before shooting had finished on Pandora's Box, controversy was raging over the picture. In 1922 Leopold Jessner had adapted the Franz Wedekind play Lulu for the screen with Asta Nielsen in the role of the nymphomaniac who leaves havoc in her wake. Both the play and the film provoked fury among self-appointed moral guardians. Pabst's film, based on the same source, makes no concessions. He boldly presents the prostitute Lulu as a creature who combines amorality and innocence, blithly unaware of the tragedies that mark her passage. This is no morality tale. Instead, Pabst fixes his camera on the extraordinary young American actress portraying Lulu. Louise Brooks is a 22-year-old with 13 Hollywood films behind her and a reputation as a rebel. A distinctive beauty, she has made the part of Lulu her own, portraying her sexuality with a directness that has left critics and public arguing whether the performance is one of great acting or remarkable instinct.
- Prague, 1 March: Release of Father Vojtech, the first film directed by the actor and scripwriter Martin Fric -- Karel Lamac's disciple and collaborator.
- New York, 3 March: William Fox, the film producer, has announced he plans to acquire a majority shareholding in Loew's Incorporated at a cost of $50 million. Marcus Loew's company currently holds the controlling interest in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, whose head Louis B. Mayer is reported to be outraged at the idea of MGM being absorbed by Fox.
- Paris, 1 April:
 His name is Luis Buñuel, he is Spanish, and he has just made a striking entry into the closed club of the surrealists by means of a strange film called Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). Surprisingly, the performance at the Studio des Ursulines failed to create the expected riot. Man Ray, as well as the other surrealists in attendance, acknowledged Buñuel and Salvador Dali, the co-author of the scenario, as being on their wavelength. However, the surrealists are shocked by the fact that many of the audiences who like the film are, in their own eyes, "bourgeois." Buñuel himself was disappointed that he was not able to use the pebbles he had in his pocket in the event of any violent reactions to the film.
- Paris, 5 April: After being banned by the authorities for four months, the new film from director Jacques Feyder, Les Nouveaux messieurs (The New Gentlemen) from an original script by Feyder and Charles Spaak, has finally opened here at the Paramount, though with a few discreet cuts. The ban was actually initiated by a few members of Parliament, in spite of the support given the film by the press as well as a favorable response from most of the critics. The film, which pokes fun at rival politicians, was officially felt to go too far in undermining the "dignity of Parliament and its ministers," a decision more farcical than anything that could have been dreamed up in the screenplay. As of 11 March, the film censorship commission's decision to lift the ban was intended to allay any further criticism by the press while, at the same time, imposing certain cuts that would make the film more acceptable to Parliament.
- New York, 6 April:
 Clara Bow has made the transition to sound. The "It" girl, revelaing a Brooklyn accent that perfectly suits her uninhibited personality, stars in The Wild Party for Paramount, in which she gives a wild and wonderful performance as a college student who falls for a handsome professor (Fredric March). It is not, however, merely Clara's powerful appeal that renders this admittedly frivolous piece worth of our attention. The Wild Party is directed with zest and pace by Dorothy Arzner who, with her fifth assignment behind the camera, proves once and for all that she is equal to the task that seems otherwise exclusively entrusted to men. The California-based Arzner began in the film industry in 1919 as a humble stenographer in the script department of Famous Players. She was promoted to script clerk and then trained as a film cutter, graduating to the job of editor. Arzner was responsible for the imaginative editing of the exciting bullfight sequences in Valentino's Blood and Sand, an achievement that so impressed director James Cruze that in 1923 he entrusted her with the task of editing his now famous break-through Western, The Covered Wagon. Paramount finally gave Arzner her first directing assignment with Fashions for Women two years ago. Let's hope that her latest success will allow her to bring the "woman's touch" to increasingly interesting material.
- Moscow, 9 April: Dziga Vertov's experimental film Man With a Movie Camera (aka Russia Today) has been released here. Despite the clues given in the advertising, this documentary style view of Odessa is full of surprises.
- Sao Paolo, 13 April: The Patriot, directed by Ernst Lubitsch with Emil Jannings, is the first sound film to be screened in Brazil. It was filmed, in fact, without sound and partially post-synchronized.
- Berlin, 29 April: Release of Die Frau nach der man sich sehnt (The Woman That Men Yearn For), directed by the theatrical producer Kurt Bernhardt and starring Marlene Dietrich.
- Hollywood, 16 May:
 For the first time, representatives of the American movie industry have decided to honor the best among them. The idea for the awards was born at Louis B. Mayer's villa in Santa Monica in January 1927. At a banquet at the Roosevelt Hotel this evening, film notables gathered to honor the most brilliant actors, actresses, directors and technicians of the year 1927-1928. William C. De Mille, brother of Cecil B., acted as chairman, and Douglas Fairbanks, president of the Academy of Moton Picture Arts and Sciences, handed out 13 statuettes in front of 200 members of the movie industry. The 13-and-a-half-inch tall, gold-plated eight-pound figure of a man wielding a crusader's sword standing on a reel of film was designed in a few minutes on a tablecloth at Hollywood's Biltmore Hotel by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons. In addition to awards for acting, directing and writing, two special awards were presented to Charles Chaplin for his "versatility and genius in writing, directing and producing The Circus," and to Warner Bros. "for producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry." The biggest sensation of the banquet was the screening of a short talker in which Douglas Fairbanks was seen and heard in a conversation with Wings producer Adolph Zukor.
- New York, 18 May:
 A whiff of scandal hangs over the release of Laurel and Hardy's latest film, Double Whoopee, directed by Lewis R. Foster. Leo McCarey's screenplay gives blonde newcomer Jean Harlow ample opportunity to display her physical charms. Hopeless hotel porter, played by Stan Laurel, contrives to shut a taxi door on the glamorous young woman's evening dress. The taxi moves off, leaving Harlow on the sidewalk in her underwear. Blithely unaware of her state of déshabilée, she strides purposefully into the crowded hotel lobby, creating a sensation among the guests. In another scene there is a wickedly funny burlesque of Erich von Stroheim that was praised by no less a movie fan than the turbulent Austrian actor-director himself. Double Whoopee is a triumph for Laurel and Hardy and a step on the way to stardom for Harlow. The 18-year-old Harlow was born in Kansas City, MO. She eloped at the age of 16, but the marriage didn't last. Eventually, she gravitated to Los Angeles where she got by with work as an extra and featured roles in a number of two-reel Christie comedies before making her mark alongside Stan and Ollie.
- New York, 27 May: Release of Broadway, made by Paul Fejos. It is one of the first sound films to introduce a mobile camera and the use of a special crane, built for Universal at a cost of $75,000.
- Hollywood, 1 June: Equity, the 10-year-old actors' union, has called for a strike against the studios. The union is demanding the exclusion of non-union actors, a 48-hour work week, and the guarantee that no dubbing will be undertaken without the actors' permission.
- Mexico, 7 June: A decree has been passed that all foreign films must be subtitled in Spanish. However, the public, who are mostly illiterate, are demanding the integral dubbing of films.
- New York, 22 June: Release of Josef von Sternberg's first talking film, Thunderbolt.
- London, 30 June: Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail, the first talking film made in England, establishes him as a master of the obsessional thriller.
- France, 30 June: V. Ivanoff, the head of the Ecran d'Art company, has announced the filming of The End of the World by Abel Gance. The film, based on a novel by Camille Flammarion, will be using the Gaumont-Petersen-Poulsen sound process.
- Paris, 3 July: Bernard Natan, whose company Rapid Film merged with Pathé in a takeover last February, has become the new head of the Pathé empire. Charle Pathé was forced to yield his position due to pressure from his financiers. He is, however, to remain on the board of directors.
- Los Angeles, 30 July:
 With the advertising slogan "It's RKO -- Let's Go!", a new motion picture company has kicked off with a musical pictured entitled Street Girl. RKO, which stands for Radio-Keith-Orpheum, came into being with the amalgamation of American Pathé, Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Office of America, the Keith, Albee and Orpheum theater chain and Radio Corporation of America (RCA). To reinforce its birth coinciding with the coming of sound, RKO has adopted as it logograph the image of a giant radio tower perched atop the world, beeping out its signal of "A Radio Picture." The wide-ranging enterprise, containing production, exhibition and distribution arms, has committed itself to 12 "all-talking" pictures in its first year. The new studio has amassed a substantial contingent of talent to spearhead its quest for greatness that includes Betty Compson and John Harron, stars of Street Girl.
- Berlin, 30 July: UFA is currently building Europe's most modern sound-film studios in Neubabelsberg. The cost is estimated at 6 million marks.
- USA, 3 August: Release of The Cockeyed World, a sequel to What Price Glory, both directed by Raoul Walsh with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe.
- New York, 3 August:
 Audiences are rolling in the aisles over Paramount's The Cocoanuts, the Marx Brothers' madcap movie debut. No one can make any sense of the story, written by George S. Kaufman, and the stale musical sub-plot, with songs by Irving Berlin, drags more than a little. But when the four Marx brothers are on the screen, it's a riot. There's Groucho, complete with his greasepaint moustache, loping walk, ready leer and lion's share of the wisecracks; Harpo, a demented little mime; Chico, caught in between the insanity of Groucho and Harpo with a pixie hat and ice-cream Italian voice; and Zeppo, the handsome but dogged straight man with all the charisma of an enamel waistband. Kay Francis and Margaret Dumont bring up the rear and attempt to maintain their battered dignity amid the non-stop craziness. The director Robert Florey is a Frenchman, former journalist and publicity man, who now lives and works in Hollywood.
 - New York, 20 August: The new all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing film by King Vidor entitled Hallelujah! has just been released on our screens. It is the first sound feature film interpreted exclusively by blacks. The leading roles are taken by daniel haynes, who sings "Ol' Man River" from Showboat, and Nina Mae McKinney, who has been praised on Broadway, particularly in the musical revue Black Birds. The shooting of the film took place in Memphis, TN, without any sound equipment, and the silent film was then post-synchronized in a studio in Hollywood. The result surpasses all expectations. Vidor's film explores the soul of the black people as never before, and certain scenes, like the baptism in the Mississippi, astound with their authenticity.
- Paris, 31 August: The French cinema industry has moved out of its period of stupor and seems determined to catch up with its American counterpart in the area of sound films. Léon Gaumont is rebuilding the studios a La Villette to incorporate sound studios. Tobis have re-equipped their studios in Epinay, and Pathé Natan are fitting out a studio in rue Francœur.
- Berlin, 5 September: Josef von Sternberg, who is looking for actors for his new film The Blue Angel, noticed Marlene Dietrich on stage in Zwei Kravatten. He was at the theater on Erich Pommer's recommendation to consider the actor Hans Albers for the film, but his visit has resulted in the casting of Miss Dietrich in the title role.
- USA, 28 September: Lionel Barrymore's passionate outbursts in his first talking film His Glorious Night provoke laughter: it marks the end of the road for one of the greatest stars of silent films.
- Paris, 2 October: The Franco Film company run by Robert Hurel, which controls the Victorine studios and the Gaumont movie theater chain, has taken over the Louis Aubert establishment through a merger. The new company is to be known as Aubert-Franco Film.
- New York, 6 October:
 The RKO Radio studio is celebrating its first busy year of production. Marching under the banner "It's RKO -- Let's Go!" are actors Bebe Daniels, Betty Compson, Richard Dix and Rudy Vallee, and directors Luther Reed, Wesley Ruggles and Malcolm St. Clair. Underlining the studio's preference for motion pictures with a high musical content, crooner Rudy Vallee has scored a solid box-office hit with The Vagabond Lover, in which he plays a stage-struck hick who poses as America's "Saxophone King." But the studio's biggest hit of the year has been Rio Rita, a spectacular musical Western brought to the screen after a year's run on Broadway. Bebe Daniels, in her first talking picture, and John Boles, on loan from Universal, star as the warlbing riders of the purple sage, and Wheeler and Wolsey provide comic relief. The lavish sets and costumes were designed my Max Ree, and producer William Le Baron's determination to spare no expense has resulted in an eye-catching river barge finale, shot in two-strip Technicolor.
- Moscow, 7 October: Premiere of The General Line, made by S. M. Eisenstein in 1926 and originally titled The Old and the New.
- Berlin, 15 October: Premiere of Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl), the new film from G. W. Pabst.
- Rome, 24 October: Release of Alessandro Blasetti's film Sole, an avant-garde documentary.
 - Los Angeles, 26 October: Premiere of Sam Wood's So This Is College from MGM. This college campus musical comes complete with frat boys, football, flappers and friendship. A scheming co-ed (Sally Start) comes between college buddies Elliott Nugent and Robert Montgomery, and their romantic rivalry soon follows them onto the football field.
- Hollywood, 26 October:
 The eagerly-awaited co-starring of the King and Queen of Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, has finally come about in The Taming of the Shrew. It was Sam Taylor, the young phenomenon who recently directed Mary in Coquette, who urged the couple to film one of the Shakespeare plays. Douglas went along with the idea, and, by elimination as much as anything else, decided on The Taming of the Shrew. Some purists might object to the liberties being taken with the Bard of Avon, but the adaptation and direction by Taylor is highly effective. Wherease Shakespeare takes some time to get the plot underway, the film opens with Katherina the hell-cat displaying her temper. In the scene where Petruchio soliloquizes on how he is going to make her a dutiful wife, we see Mary eavesdropping. Audiences realize then that Mary is in complete control of the situation, and, just in case we miss the point, she gives us a big wink in the closing scene. The main interest, however, is in the performances of the two stars. Mary, smashing windows and mirrors and wielding a whip, provides a great deal of fun. And Doug, as her tamer, is as virile as ever, even characteristically leaping on horses. Their voices, too, are up to the task.
- New York, 4 November: Warner Bros. has completed its takeover of the First National company.
- London, 10 November: Eisenstein, who is traveling with Grigori Alexandrov and Edouard Tissé, has met John Grierson, Bernard Shaw, Paul Rotha and Basil Wright while in Britain.
- Paris, 15 November: The federation of ciné-clubs has been set up with Germaine Dulac as its first president.
- London, 25 November:
 Widely advertised as "The First Full Length All Talkie Film Made in Great Britain," Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail has just opened here to great acclaim. "Blackmail is perhaps the most intelligent mixture of silence and sound we have yet seen," wrote the critic in Close Up, and the Bioscope agrees: "By this masterly production, Hitchcock amply fulfills the promise shown in his earlier efforts." In fact, the film was not conceived as a talkie, but the production company, BIP, recognized that the sound revolution was in progress across the Atlantic and permitted the director to re-shoot many of the silent sequences, using the new sound equipment. The resulting film thus retains the visual qualities, pace and use of locations associated with the silents, successfully blended with the recorded dialogue and sound effects of a talkie. A fascinating and complex thriller, Blackmail is notable for its sophisticated and original exploration of the triangular relationship that develops between the attractive young heroine (Anny Ondra) who is implicated in a murder, her policeman boyfriend (John Longden), and a sleazy character who is aware of the situation and tries to blackmail the girl. In this last role, Donald Calthrop give a superb performance as a memorable villain.
- Paris, 16 December:
 In the course of an exceptional gala organized in his honor by Studio 28 and the newspapers Le Figaro and L'Ami du Peuple, Georges Méliès has come into his own again. Two thousand five hundred spectators were present at the Salle Pleyel to witness his miraculous return to the limelight. A committee of honor, consisting of numerous personalities, including Abel Gance, were responsible for paying this moving homage to Méliès the Magician: the creator of cinematographic spectacle. The evening climaxed with the showing of Cecil B. De Mille's The Cheat, and a selection of the fantasy films of Méliès, among them The Conquest of the Pole and The Hallucinations of Baron Münchhausen. These remarkable films, recently recovered from the Château Dufayel by Jean Mauclaire, founder of Studio 28, were colored by hand especially for showing at the gala. Méliès, who has not been heard from for many years, was found by chance by the editor of the weekly Ciné-Journal, Léon Druhot, running a modest candy and toy shop on the first floor of the Gare Montparnasse. The shop belongs to Méliès' wife, Charlotte Faës, who formerly performed in his films under the name of Jehanne d'Alcy. Druhot rapidly informed several journalists, among whom were Paul Gibson and Jean-George Auriot who actually conceived the idea of the gala.
Georges Méliès directed his last two films in 1913. Since that time, his existence has been difficult. The problems started in 1913 with the loss of a lawsuit against him by Pathé Film. The war of 1914 caused him to close down the Robert Houdin Theatre. He then transformed one of his Montreuil studios into the Théâtre des Variétés. In 1923, he was totally ruined and declared bankrupt. At the request of his creditors, he was ordered by the tribunal to sell all his property, and many of his films were melted down into a substance used in the manufacture of footwear. From then on, Méliès and his family survived by giving concerts in the provinces. Widowed in 1913, he married Jehanne d'Alcy in 1925. Since then, the couple have lived very simply on the proceeds from the shop.
- Hollywood, 29 December: Universal has released the first sound film to be shot on location, Hell's Heroes, filmed in Death Valley by William Wyler.
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21 January - New York City,