- Washington, 12 January: RKO, Warner Bros. and Paramount have been summoned to appear before a grand jury on charges of monopolistic practices.
- Hollywood, 18 January:
 In a piece of inspired casting, MGM decided to borrow W. C. Fields from Paramount to play Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield. The film's director, George Cukor, had great difficulty in persuading Fields that he could not remedy Dickens' unaccountable omission of any juggling in his novel with a few choice routines of his own. In the end, audiences have been denied the sight of a juggling Micawber -- however, as the genially feckless spendthrift, Fields remains true to his own unique comic personality. When he assures us that something will turn up, we are left in no doubt that he foresees some fresh calamity looming, as bizarre and unpredictable as some of the outrageous names he habitually chooses for the characters in his films. In a splendidly cast film, Edna May Oliver plays Betsy Trotwood, Basil Rathbone and Violet Kemble Cooper play the Murdstones, Lennox Pawle is Mr. Dick, and Roland Young the slimy Uriah Heep. Luckily, these salty performances more than compensate for the anodyne David Copperfield: prissy, proper little Freddie Bartholomew as the boy, and bland Frank Lawton as the young man.
 - Hollywood, 5 February: The latest change to be announced by the much troubled Paramount movie empire is the appointment of the leading producer-director Ernst Lubitsch as studio production chief. Like most of the other major Hollywood studios, Paramount did well during 1929 and 1930, the first years of sound, but by 1931 the impact of the Depression was beginning to be felt. Deep in the red by 1932, the company underwent a major shakeup in management for the first time since its initial formation in 1916. As a result, studio head Jesse L. Lasky was forced out, along with production chief B. P. Schulberg, while even the powerful figure of Adolph Zukor, the company president, emerged from the boardroom battles with his authority severely curtailed. In spite of cost-cutting efforts, the company was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1933. The next production executive, Manny Cohen, failed to match up to expectations and thus, in a surprise move, the top executives have turned to a filmmaker of stature to put the studio back on the road to recovery.
Since he arrived from Germany some 12 years ago, Lubitsch has more than repeated the success of his European career. Popular with actors and fellow directors alike, he has been closely associated with Paramount throughout the sound era. It is likely, however, that his appointment is a stop-gap measure until a suitable permanent candidate can be found.
 - Hollywood, 27 February:
 There is some controversy about how the gold statuette presented at the Academy Award ceremony got its nickname of "Oscar." Whether it came from a music-hall joke, "Will you have a cigar, Oscar?" as Sidney Skolsky the columnist claims, or was named after Bette Davis' husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr., or indeed whether it derived from the Academy executive and librarian Margaret Herrick, who was supposed to have exclaimed, "Why he resembles my Uncle Oscar!", the cognomen has been taken up by the members of the Academy and the public. The movie It Happened One Night, its stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert and the director, Frank Capra, were all recipients of Oscars. A miniature version of the statue was given to Shirley Temple "in grateful appreciation of her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment during the year 1934."
- Hollywood, 28 February: Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's divorce is now final.
 - Moscow, 1 March: The first International Film Festival in Eastern Europe, held in Moscow, which began on 21 February, has just ended. The major prize given by the jury, which included Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko and Vsevolod Pudovkin, was awarded to Leningrad's Lenfilm Studios. Of the homegrown productions, the just greatly appreciated Chapayev by Georgi and Sergei Vasliliev from the novel by Anna and Dimitri Furmanov, The Youth of Maxim, directed by Grigori Dozintzev and Leonid Trauberg, and Friedrich Ermler's Peasants. The best was undoubtedly Chapayev, which had been greeted in an editorial in Pravda in November 1934. An honorary prize was given to Tsai Chu-Sheng's Chinese film, The Song of the Fisherman, which takes up the cause of Yangtze boatmen. Among the other foreign motion pictures to win prizes were René Clair's The Last Millionaire and King Vidor's Our Daily Bread.
- Hollywood, 2 March: Friz Freleng has directed I Haven't Got a Hat, a short cartoon for Leon Schlesinger's "Merrie Melodies," featuring a wonderful new character called Porky Pig.
- Berlin, 28 March:
 A significant cinematographic event in the form of Adolf Hitler's commissioned Triumph of the Will premiered today at the UFA Palast am Zoo. Directed by Leni Riefenstahl, this enormous production has finally reached German screens after six months' editing, which entailed the selection of about three percent of the material shot in order to provide a film of two hours in length. The result has proven satisfactory to the Third Reich. This impressive documentary shows the preparations, the marches and the speeches at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, held by the Nazi Party. Riefenstahl has shaped the rally into a great mythic spectacle, with the Führer appearing as a Wagnerian hero descending on the medieval town to save das volk. Ecstatic faces stare up at him as he sun catches his head like a halo. Other key sequences exalt healthy youth, family life, the virile harmony of the military, and the enthusiasm of the workers. Triumph of the Will concludes with the Nazi anthem "Horst Wessel Lied." The film sets out to reveal "the order, unity and ambition of the National-Socialist Movement." As such it has been faithful to the message.
- USA, 24 April: Release of Richard Boleslawski's Les Misérables, with Fredric March as Jean Valjean, Charles Laughton as Inspector Javert, Florence Eldridge as Fantine and Rochelle Hudson as Cosette. This film is the third American adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel.
- New York, 3 May: Release of The Devil Is a Woman, Josef von Sternberg's adaptation of the novel by Pierre Louys, with Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill and Cesar Romero.
- New York, 9 May:
 Director John Ford has triumphed with his latest film, an RKO production of The Informer, the second screen version of Liam Flaherty's novel. The story unfolds in Ireland in 1922. Gypo Nolan, played by the British star Victor McLaglen, sells out his best friend, a Sinn Fein man, for a few pounds. The dull-witted Judas is then overwhelmed by the consequences of his treachery, taken prisoner by his former comrades, tried in secret and executed.
Shot in three weeks on a relatively low budget of $243,000, The Informer is a powerful evocation of the fog-shrouded streets of Dublin during the days of the Black and Tans. Its psychologically insightful script by Dudley Nichols has also elicited widespread praise from the critics. John Ford, an Irish-American and keen student of Irish history, is currently riding the crest of a wave of critical approval. This latest success will cement the reputation he has gained with last year's The Lost Patrol and the more recent comedy The Whole Town's Talking. The prolific Ford, like his brother Francis, was trained at the school of Thomas Ince and became a masterly director of silent Westerns, before widening his range with the coming of sound. The burly McLaglen, one of his favorite actors, had a picaresque career before entering films, as an under-age volunteer in the Life Guards, a laborer and prizefighter in America, a goldminer in Australia and an army officer in the Great War. He made his debut in 1920 as a prizefighter in a British film, The Call of the Road, and established himself as an amiable roughneck in a 1924 Vitagraph feature The Beloved Brute.
- New York, 10 May: Who is Frankenstein's promised one? Those who are interested can find out in James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein, which is being released today. Boris Karloff again stars as the poor creature, with Colin Clive and Elsa Lanchester.
- Paris, 11 May: Abel Gance has released a sound version, with a few extra scenes, of his 1927 silent film Napoléon. Paramount helped bring out this new version using the Perspective sound process for the first time. The result is sensational.
 - Hollywood, 13 May:
 Henry Hull undergoes a remarkable transformation in Universal's The Werewolf of London, turning from English botanist to rampaging wolfman, thanks to a bite on the neck from fellow lycanthrope Warner Oland, some impressive makeup from Jack Pierce and the expert special effects photography of John P. Fulton. Hull's makeup took four hours to put on and two to take off, but it takes just one bullet, fired by the head of Scotland Yard, to stop him from mauling his wife (Valerie Hobson) at the picture's climax.
Since 1931 Universal has been treating audiences to a rich cycle of horror movies. Dracula was the first, a vehicle originally intended for Universal's famous horror star of the silent era, Lon Chaney. When throat cancer took the life of Chaney in 1930, the role of the vampire was filled by the Hungarian Bela Lugosi, who re-created his hugely successful stage role, complete with deathly-palllor, jet-black opera cape and hissing, hypnotic accent. There were no makeup tricks in Dracula, only a pair of pencil spotlights shone into Lugosi's eyes to increase the chilling effect of his baleful stare. Dracula's director was Tod Browning, Lon Chaney's long-time collaborator, but British director James Whale has provided the most distinguished contributions to the genre and made a star of the studio's second great ghoul, fellow Englishman Boris Karloff, in Frankenstein. Together, Whale and Karloff fashioned an almost lyrically conceived monster whose fear of fire is, perhaps, the most compelling "horror" of the film, and whose pathetic yearning for light attains a spiritual quality. Whale has followed Frankenstein with The Old Dark House, a tongue-in-cheek Gothic piece in which Karloff plays a memorably brutish butler; The Invisible Man. a celebration of trick photography and silky voice of another accomplished English actor, Claude Rains; and The Bride of Frankenstein, in which actress Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the monster's mate. The film is an elegant parody of conventional Hollywood romance, with Whale ever attentive to his monsters' emotional lives. But there is no happy ending. "We belong dead," intones Karloff's monster as he presses the lever that blows up the laboratory.
- Hollywood, 27 May: Joseph M. Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck have bought a controlling interest in the Fox Film Corporation which has merged with their own company; this new company has been named 20th Century-Fox.
- London, 6 June:
 The premiere of The Thirty-Nine Steps, the latest film from Alfred Hitchcock, has just taken place at the New Gallery Theatre. Loosely based on the novel by John Buchan, this by turns witty, suspenseful, romantic and always entertaining new thriller confirms Hitchcock's position as "the master of suspense," and perhaps the leading British director of his generation. However, for a time in the early 1930s Hitchcock appeared to have lost his way. His films were a mixture of play adaptations, comedies, and off-beat thrillers, none of them especially successful. Then, in 1933, when he was completing work on the romantic comedy Waltzes of Vienna, he was contacted by producer Michael Balcon. This was the beginning of a new and fruitful stage in the director's career, starting with last year's fast-moving and tense spy thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much, that starred Leslie Banks, Peter Lorre and Nova Pilbeam, and now followed by this newest production. Both films come from the team of producer Balcon and associate producer Ivor Montagu for the Gaumont British studio, with Charles Bennett as scriptwriter. Among the several improvements to the Buchan novel is the addition of a beautiful and sophisticated heroine, played by the lovely Madeleine Carroll, opposite dashing, young Robert Donat. A film to remember.
- New York, 13 June:
 Premiere of Becky Sharp, based on Thackeray's Vanity Fair and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The film stars Miriam Hopkins in the title role, with Frances Dee, Cedric Hardwicke and Billie Burke. The film is not a critical or financial blockbuster. Critics dwell on the use of full-length 3-strip Technicolor for the first time in a feature film. As with anything new, they split on whether the color is overused and if there's "too much blue!" The film is a milestone, though, because it marks the first time that the masses have seen the full color spectrum on screen.
- Hollywood, 17 June: Paramount Pictures has finished its financial reorganization. Having been bought up by its own circuit's Cinema Union, it emerges under the name of Paramount Pictures Inc.
- Berlin, 2 July: A ministerial order decrees that all silent or sound films made before 30 January 1933 must once more be submitted to the censorship Commission before 31 December 1935.
- London, 14 August: The actress Vivien Leigh has signed a contract with Alexander Korda, the most influential producer in Great Britain. He has granted her the privilege of being able to act on the stage for six months each year.
- Tokyo, 15 August: Release of a sentimental comedy, directed by Mikio Naruse, Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Wife, Be Like a Rose), starring Sachko Chiba, the director's companion.
- New York, 13 September: Mark Sandrich's musical comedy Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, has beaten box-office records for Radio City Music Hall. Receipts reached $245,000 in the first two weeks.
- Paris, 20 September: Release of Julien Duvivier's La Bandera, which stars Jean Gabin, Annabella and Robert Le Vigan.
- Los Angeles, 21 September:
 The motion picture industry has been shocked to learn that the remarkably talented Hollywood choreographer Busby Berkeley is to be tried on charges of manslaughter. At a preliminary hearing today, the Los Angeles Municipal Court ordered that he face two counts of second-degree murder in connection with a three-car collision. Arraignment has been set for the morning of 7 October in Superior Court. The background to the trial is as follows: on the evening of 8 September, Berkeley attended a party in Pacific Palisades given by William Koenig, the production manager at Warners. But he had to leave the party early to keep an appointment with bandleader Gus Arnheim in Santa Monica. As he was driving along the twisting Pacific Coast Highway, the left front tire of his roadster blew out, and he careened into the path of oncoming traffic. In the resulting head-on collision, two people were killed instantly, and a third died later. Berkeley was dragged unconscious from his burning car. His lawyer, Jerry Giesler, the well-known Hollywood attorney who has defended many celebrities, will try to convince the jury of the difficulty of driving that stretch of the highway and that a blown-out tire on a small roadster would make the car impossible to control. With testimony from guests at the party, Giesler hopes to prove that Berkeley was not drunk when he set out.
 - London, 23 September: The British star Leslie Howard has returned from the Warner Brothers lot to make The Scarlet Pimpernel for Alexander Korda. Co-starring with the lovely Merle Oberon, Howard's quizzical style is perfectly suited to the role of Sir Percy Blakeney, the seemingly languid nobleman who saves French aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution. His is, in fact, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants who settled in England not long before he was born in 1893. Director Korda is a peripatetic Hungarian who settled in England in 1931. Korda had instantly grasped that the English have a seemingly unlimited appetite for comforting versions of their island's history, and in The Private LIfe of Henry VIII (1933) he fed it with extravagant costumes and the bravura acting of Charles Laughton. With his brothers, director Zoltan and art director Vincent, Korda has taken the British movie industry by the scruff of the neck, importing a dazzling range of international talent, that included Hungarian screenwriter Lajos Biró, French cameraman Georges Périnal and the American director Henry Young, and built an ambitious studio complex outside London at Denham, which he wants to turn into a British Hollywood.
- Copenhagen, 28 September: Paul Fejos describes the torments of an admired actress' conscience in Det gyldne Smil (The Golden Smile), which is being released today. Bodil Ipsen stars as the actress Elsa Bruun.
- Tokyo, 30 September: Nikkatse, the oldest of the major Japanese film production firms, has fallen victim to a stock-market crash. Henceforth, the firm is giving up the production side of its business to concentrate on distribution.
- Cairo, 10 October: All the most important people in Cairo attended the inauguration of the final stage of Misr's studios in Giza. Egyptian cinema has now become a full-fledged industry.
- New Jersey, 11 October: Joan Crawford has married the actor Franchot Tone at Englewood. The star was previously married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
- Moscow, 6 November: The production companies Ukrainfilm and Mosfilm have released Alexander Dovzhenko's latest film, Aerograd.
- Hollywood, 7 November: Paramount has released Peter Ibbetson, inspired by the novel by George De Maurier, with Gary Cooper, Ann Harding and Ida Lupino. The film is Henry Hathaway's second for 1935, the first being The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
- Hollywood, 8 November: Release of Mutiny on the Bounty, directed by Frank Lloyd, with Clark Gable as the bare-chested Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as the unyielding Captain Bligh.
- Rome, 9 November: The Italian authorities have drawn up the constitution for the ENIC (National Board of Cinema Industry). This new organization is in charge of film production, distribution and movie theater management.
- Hollywood, 15 November: The Marx Brothers have starred in their first film for MGM, A Night at the Opera, directed by Sam Wood. Their films were previously produced by Paramount.
- London, 17 December: René Clair's first English film, The Ghost Goes West, with Robert Donat and Jean Parker, was screened during a gala evening attended by Queen Mary. The guests were completely won over by the film.
 - Hollywood, 19 December:
 Shirley Temple, the bright-eyed, curly-topped, dimpled cherub, has scored another triumph in The Littlest Rebel, after The Little Colonel and Curly Top this year. Recently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt paid tribute to the talented seven-year-old: "During this Depression, when the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie, look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles." The Littlest Rebel features a different President, Abe Lincoln, on whom the tiny Shirley uses her charms to gain the release of her Southern-general father. The Little Colonel, where Shirley played Cupid to her sister, was also set during the Civil War, but Curly Top, where she sang "Animal Crackers", was more up to date.
- Los Angeles, 26 December: Release of Captain Blood with Errol Flynn in his first starring role and Olivia De Havilland. Michael Curtiz directed.
- Berlin, 31 December: Average production costs in Germany have doubled since 1933. This is mainly due to the inflated salaries paid to actors and directors.
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14 February - New York City,