- 5 January, Moscow: Director Vsevolod Pudovkin has disconcerted audiences with his first sound film La Vie est belle (Life Is Beautiful), due to his exaggerated use of slow motion and an overly extravagant scenario.
- 24 January, Paris: Never has a film by Abel Gance been so badly received as The End of the World (La Fin du monde), which was shown at a gala evening at the Olympia. Featuring Gance himself in the role of Christ, and actor Victor Francen, the film confused the public, who found it incomprehensible. Opinion has also been scandalized by the manner in which Gance's first talkie was modified and cut by half on the orders of the distributor, Jacques Haik, who had acquired full rights. The End of the World was originally meant to run more than three hours. The director was absent from the screening as a protest at the "distorted version" on display. Among other things, the sound quality was poor. Only a minority of critics remained, sensitive to the visionary aspect of this sadly missed opportunity.
- 30 January, Los Angeles: Charles Chaplin's latest film City Lights, with himself, Virginia Cherrill and Harry Myers, has been given a triumphant reception. The sound track was added after the shooting was completed on the film with a budget over $1.5 million.
- 19 February, Berlin:
 With his The Threepenny Opera, an adaptation from the Brecht-Weill work, G.W. Pabst has returned to the realism of his previous films. Set in 19th-century London, Mack the Knife, the King of the Underworld, kidnaps and marries Polly Peachum, daughter of the King of the Beggars. Furious, the latter sends his gang to pursue the undesirable son-in-law. But all ends well when beggars and rogues are reconciled and make their fortunes at the coronation of Queen Victoria with the involuntary complicity of the forces of law and order. Brecht and Weill were to do the screenplay, but their desire to give it even more anti-bourgois bite than the stage version proved too strong for the film producers. Yet the performances, particularly from Lotte Lenya (Weill's wife), and the wonderful songs, retain much of the original pungency.
- 25 February, Paris: The newly fitted out Pagoda cinema has opened in the Chinese Pavilion, rue de Babylone. A Spanish film, The Price of a Kiss, was scheduled for the opening.
- 5 March, Hollywood: Carl Laemmle, founder and president of Universal, has just celebrated his 25th anniversary in the movie business. He opened his first nickelodeon 25 years ago in 1906.
- 10 March, Marseilles: A group of moviegoers is offering to teach audiences how to whistle down bad films. The initiative is worrying local advertising agencies.
- 18 March, Hollywood:
 The new film by F.W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty, Tabu, has just been released in American theaters. Unhappily, it will be a posthumous work for Murnau, because the famous German director was killed in a car accident on the Santa Barbara highway scarcely a week ago. In February 1929, the admired director of Sunrise broke his contract with Fox, which had obliged him to supply them with three films. He and Flaherty then formed their own company and took off for the South Seas to make Tabu. Murnau then proceeded to develop his own version of the film. He used the people and setting of the shimmering paradise of Tahiti to tell a fictional story -- a young fisherman falls in love with a virgin dedicated to the gods. "When our yacht entered port in Bora-Bora," Murnau stated recently, "the indigenous population had never even seen a Kodak." The film was left silent and unfinished, forcing Paramount to post-synchronize it with a score by Dr. Hugo Riesenfeld.
- 25 March, Tokyo: The Nippon Gekkyo, with its three screens, immense organs and 4,000 seats, is advertised as being more modern than the Gaumont Palace.
- 20 April, Algiers: Charlie Chaplin has arrived from Nice to join his older brother Sydney. This is his first visit to North Africa and he intends among other things to visit the Casbah.
- 30 April, London: French director René Clair is fast becoming one of Britain's favorite filmmakers. His film Le Million is a triumphant success.
- 30 April, Paris: The press has echoed rumors about the international crisis in the movie theater industry. The problem seems to be an apparent lack of availability of new releases in proportion to the theater network's needs, exacerbated by the increase in costs incurred by the use of sound equipment.
- 11 May, Berlin:
 M, director Fritz Lang's first talking picture, was originally entitled M - Mörder unter uns (Murderers Among Us), but the Nazi Party, suspecting that the title is in some way aimed at them, has turned menacing pressure on Lang. Inspired by grim real-life events in the city of Düsseldorf, where a child-killer conducted a reign of terror, Lang has created an extraordinary portrait of a psychopath. In the role of the murderer, Peter Lorre, a little-known stage actor, gives a stunning performance. Squat and corpulent, with melancholy eyes alternately beseeching or bulging with terror as he is hunted down by both the police and the underworld, Lorre creates a killer who is both pitiable and deeply disturbing, a victim himself of a diseased society. Lang has placed his monster in the context of a Germany gripped by an economic and moral crisis in which the sickness that drives the child-killer is paralleled by the uncontrollable impulses of evil political forces lurking in the shadows. The horribly plausible split personality of Lorre's killer is a metaphor for the forces that divide Germany today. Though Lang may have changed the title, the meaning remains the same. He has successfully captured the atmosphere of a city besieged by fear and torn between order and mob violence.
 - 15 May Hollywood: Following Edward G. Robinson's success in Little Caesar, Warner Bros. have now another hard-edged gangster movie and a new star in James Cagney, whose dynamic performance as an underworld king in Public Enemy has caused a sensation. Pint-sized Cagney was originally cast as second lead to Edward Woods, but director William A. Wellman soon had second thoughts and swapped the roles. And Cagney plays hoodlum Tom Powers with gleeful relish, mashing a grapefruit in Mae Clark's face, and finally being delivered dead and bound up on his mother's doorstep. Cagney, a former vaudeville song-and-dance man, was co-starring alongside Joan Blondell in Penny Arcade when Warners bought the show, turned it into Sinner's Holiday, and took an option on him for $400 a week.
- 20 May, Hollywood: Mary Pickford has bought up all her silent films. She feels that the recent technical advances in the film industry have made actors in old films look ridiculous.
- 22 May, New York: Premiere of The Smiling Lieutenant, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Maurice Chevalier.
- 9 June, Hollywood:
 Clara Bow is to be released from the contract she signed with Paramount in August 1926. Clara's fall from grace has been sad and sudden. Only two years ago the "It" girl was voted America's most popular female star, but now she is adrift on a sea of scandal. It seems that her colorful private life bears more than a passing resemblance to her first talkie, The Wild Party. Last year the vivacious star disclosed that she had paid off a doctor's wife for "alienation of affections." Then the dizzy girl ran up a debt of $14,000 in a Lake Tahoe gambling joint without realizing what she was doing. But worse was yet to come. Earlier this year Clara accused her former secretary Daisy de Voe of embezzlement and took her to court. Daisy hit back with hard evidence of the actress's predilection for booze, drugs and gigolos. Daisy was convicted on only one of 37 charges of larceny she faced, and was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, but emerged from the trial ahead on points. When Bow signed with Paramount she demanded and secured the removal of the get-out clause that allowed the studio to release her in the event of a scandal. The studio also agreed to pay Bow a lump sum when the contract was dissolved, but only if no scandal attached to her departure. With Bow's popularity plummeting by the week, Paramount has decided to release her, but is hanging on to the payoff dough.
- 30 June, Berlin: All Quiet on the Western Front has finally been passed by the censors here, despite violent protests from Hitlerian youth groups and the disapproval of the Reichstag. Special precautions have been taken in the theater where it is being screened to avoid incidents.
- 21 August, New York: Release of Pardon Us, the first short feature starring the comic actors Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. It was directed by James Parrott with sets by Cedric Gibbons.
- 22 August, Hollywood: Josef von Sternberg's latest film, An American Tragedy, starring Sylvia Sidney and Phillips Holmes, has just been released. Freely adapted from the novel of the same title written by Theodore Dreiser, the picture has had a troubled production history, during which Dreiser hauled Sternberg before the courts for taking too many liberties with the original. Sternberg has been obliged to restore so many scenes that in themselves they constitute a kind of premiere. As a result, the director has disowned the picture.
- 14 September, Stockholm: Release of En Natt (One Night), by Gustaf Molander, with Karin Swanström, Ingert Bjuggren and Gerda Lundeqvist. The quality of the soundtrack is proof that Molander has made the transition to talking films without a hitch.
- 15 September, France: Film director G.W. Pabst is deep in the coal mines in the Pas-de-Callais region where he is completing the last shots of Kameradschaft with the participation of local miners. The film is based on the 1906 mining catastrophe in Courrières.
- 19 September, Hollywood: Release of the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, directed by Norman Z. McLeod.
- 20 September, USA: At a recent congress, movie theater managers united against the abundance of gangster films, which according to them, irritate the public. They also stated that the exhorbitant salaries paid to film stars are to blame for the high cost of film hire.
- 30 September, France: The wet summer has been catastrophic for film production. Several films being shot on location had to be postponed or canceled.
- 8 October, New York: The wife of Josef von Sternberg has initiated proceedings against the actress Marlene Dietrich, wife of Rudolph Sieber, for the "alienation of her husband's affection."
- 17 October, Paris: Release of Alexander Korda's film Marius, adapted from Marcel Pagnol's play. The Paramount-Pagnol production starrs Raimu, Pierre Fresnay and Orane Demazis.
- 18 October, West Orange, NJ: Death of the inventor and cinema pioneer Thomas Alva Edison, at the age of 84.
- 20 October, Hollywood: Douglas Fairbanks is putting the finishing touches on the film he made during a recent voyage. It is to be released under the title Around the World in 80 Minutes.
- 20 October, Lisbon: The 23-year-old filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira has released his first film Duoro, Faina Fluvial (Working on the Duoro River). This project is a cut above the run-of-the-mill and mediocre documentaries that have proliferated since a new law in their favor was passed.
- 31 October, Hollywood:
 With her starring role in Platinum Blonde, lovely Jean Harlow has not only collected a soubriquet but has incontestably demonstrated that she is an actress of considerable talent. In this witty romp directed by Frank Capra, Harlow plays an upper-crust socialite who bullies her reporter husband (Robert Williams) into conforming to her highfalutin ways. The husband chafes at the confinement of high society, though, and yearns for a creative outlet. He decides to write a play and collaborates with a fellow reporter (Loretta Young); the results are unexpectedly hilarious, especially when Young shows up at the mansion with a gaggle of boozehound reporters in tow. With snappy, ribald dialogue, Capra keeps the gags flying fast and furious, taking special delight in having Williams's journalist pals rib him endlessly over his kept-man status. Platinum Blonde is a great success with audiences and critics; for better or worse, Harlow will be identified with the tag "platinum blonde" until her untimely death.
 - 19 November, Paris: Two months after her death in a car accident, Janie Marèze, the young star of Mam'zelle Nitouche, has died again, this time on screen in Jean Renoir's latest film La Chienne (The Bitch). In it, she plays a prostitute who winds up being killed by an amateur painter, whom she had been exploiting. Adapted from a novel by Georges de La Fouchardière, La Chienne is an astonishingly realistic work. The reconstruction of Montmartre by art director Gabriel Scognamillo is admirable, as are the sound effects used to recreate the ambience of this popular and bohemian district. The performances of Marèze, Michel Simon (the client) and George Flamant (the pimp) are remarkable. The actress was imposed on Renoir by the co-producers Roger Richebé and Charles David. The director had wanted his wife, Catherine Hessling (or Florelle), for the role. But Janie Marèze know how to get around the producers as much as she does the two men in the film. But if the film imitated life, so life imitated the film. During the shooting, Simon became infatuated with Marèze who fell for Flamant. The film completed, Flamant was driving the fair Marèze along the Riviera in his new Cadillac, when he lost control of the car and it crashed, killing his passenger. Michel Simon was so distraught during the funeral that he fainted, and later had to be restrained from attacking Flamant.
- 21 November, Hollywood:
 Thanks to Universal, Hollywood is enjoying a horror boom. With Bela Lugosi in the title role, Tod Browning's Dracula was an immediate hit when it was released last February, and now it's the turn of director James Whale's Frankenstein to pull in big audiences. Adapted from a play by Peggy Webling, which in turn drew on Mary Shelley's celebrated Gothic novel, the film stars Colin Clive as the scinentist who creates an uncontrollable monster, played by Boris Karloff, who carries off the honors. Brilliantly made up by Jack Pierce, who made him 18 inches taller and a full 65 pounds heavier, Karloff excites both horror and pity. The studio now has two new stars.
 - 28 November, Berlin: For her big screen directing debut, Leontine Sagan has chosen a previously unexplored theme: the relations between young women living in a highly authoritarian boarding school. In Mädschen in Uniform Manuela, played by Hertha Thiele, is a spirited and independent teenager sent to a boarding school when her mother dies. The Prussian principal runs the school with an iron hand, believing that discipline and hunger strengthen a girl's character. Like the rest of the girls, Manuela develops a crush on Elizabeth Von Bernburg (played by Dorthea Wieck), a young teacher who believes it's important to be the children's trusted friend. Manuela's mistake is to announce her love in front of guests and students at a party following a school play. This "forbidden passion" leads to Manuela's attempted suicide. This all-female production treats a difficult subject with tact and delicate eroticism.
- New York, 10 December: The Struggle, directed by D.W. Griffith, has been a serious failure both financially and in the eyes of the critics.
- 18 December, Paris:
 René Clair's third talkie À nous la liberté has just been shown to the public. Great praise was heaped upon his previous film Le Million, released last April, though it had a rather antiquated plot and was a commission by Tobis. What elevated that operetta was its remarkable soundtrack and mise-en-scène. This time, Clair has been able to put his brilliant technique at the service of a wonderful subject and a scenario that he wrote himself. The story tells of a friendship that unites Louis (Raymond Cordy) and Emile (Henri Marchand), two escapees from prison. Separated by the years, chance brings them together again, when Louis becomes a worker in Emile's gramophone factory. After Emile is threatened with blackmail, he decides to give his factory to the workers, and the two buddies take to the road again as tramps. By making clever use of songs, sound effects, rhythmic dialogue and accurately choreographed movements, Clair has created a musical comedy satire on the work ethic of mass-production techniques. In a light-hearted manner, an analogy is made between the prison and the factory, underlined by Lazare Meerson's striking sets, that dwarf the workers.
- 31 December, Berlin: This year, UFA has experimented with a new color process for a film called The Many-Colored World of Animals.
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5 January - San Diego, CA, Robert Duvall
6 March - Memphis, TN, Hal Needham
