- Prague, 1 January: The Barrandov studios have had two new sound stages built, making them the biggest and most modern studios in Europe. Even foreign film crews are coming to work here.
- Warsaw, 2 January: Aleksander Ford's documentary Secrets of the Young, about the plight of impoverished Jewish and Polish orphans in a sanitarium, has been banned as being "a vehicle for communist propaganda."
- Los Angeles, 11 January:
 John Gilbert is being buried today. He has died of a heart attack at his Hollywood home at the age of 40. After the death of Valentino, Gilbert became the silent screen's most popular leading man. The sexual electricity that crackled in his screen romances with Garbo in Love, Flesh and the Devil, and A Woman of Affairs led to a celebrated romance, which prompted columnist Walter Winchell to coin the phrase "Garbo-Gilberting" as shorthand for torrid affairs. Gilbert's career was killed by the talkies, not so much because of his squeaky voice, as some have alledged, but because his acting style was too intense to bear the weight of words. Valentino's successor as the Great Lover drank himself to death.
 - Paris, 24 January: By taking a story of a crooked boss and a workers' cooperative, Jean Renoir has succeeded in his latest film, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, in trenchantly dealing with contemporary issues. Shot in 25 days, the film reflects the optimism of the Popular Front, but is delivered in the language of black comedy. The scenario, co-written by poet Jacques Prévert, tells of a group of workers who take over a publishing house when their boss absconds, making them believe he is dead. When he returns to gain control, Lange, a writer of Westerns, kills him. The two contrasting actors -- the evil Jules Berry and the good René Lefèvre -- are superb.
- Rome, 29 January: Benito Mussolini laid the first stone of the Cinecittá studios today. It is hoped that the new facilities will help in boosting Italian production.
- Berlin, 1 February: Three years after the Nazi Party's arrival in power, the German cinema finds itself in a serious crisis. This is primarily due to a growing rejection of German films in other countries because they are so loaded with German propaganda.
- New York, 5 February:
 Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin's first film since the 1931 City Lights, has opened at the Rivoli Theater to capacity business. The gestation of the film followed a by-now familiar pattern. He spent a year preparing the story and then 11 months shooting. When filming finally began, at the beginning of October last year, Chaplin was still undecided about making a sound film in which the Tramp would speak for the first time. Dialogue had been written by Chaplin but, in the end, all we hear from him is a strange little nonsense song performed in a language of Charlie's own invention. In Modern Times the Tramp finds himself one of the millions trying to cope in a modern world that is dominated by machines. Working on a factory conveyor belt, Charlie is caught in the cogs of a malevolent machine, is used to test an automatic feeder and finally runs amok. His further adventures include a spell in prison accused of being a Red agitator (after considerately picking up a red flag that has fallen off a truck), but things pick up when he encounters the Gamin, a gutsy young woman on the lam from juvenile officers. She is played by Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's companion since 1933, although neither will confirm whether or not they are married. Goddard, a former Goldwyn Girl whom Charlie met while on the yacht of Joseph M. Schenck, is a revelation in the role. In a tattered dress and innocent of makeup, she nevertheless radiates sensuality as well as an underlying strength and stubborness. At the end of the picture the Tramp and the Gamin toddle off hand in hand, retreating into a rural sunset reminiscent of Chaplin's days at Mutual.
- Cairo, 10 February: Release of Wedad, the first film to come out of the new Misr studios. It is also the singer Oum Kalsoum's first screen role.
- Paris, 12 February: First screening of Mayerling, adapted from Claude Anet's novel by Joseph Kessel, and directed by Anatole Litvak with Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux.
- Paris, 17 February: The Pathé-Natan company has been pronounced bankrupt by the courts.
- Hollywood, 5 March: At the ninth annual presentation of the Academy Awards this evening, Bette Davis was the recipient of the "holdover Award" for Dangerous. This refers to the scandalous oversight of last year, when she was not even nominated for Of Human Bondage.
- Los Angeles, 7 March: Douglas Fairbanks has remarried. His bride is his former mistress, the English Sylvia Hawkes, formerly Lady Ashley. The couple have made their home in Fairbanks' ranch near Santa Monica on the Pacific coast. Fairbanks' fabulous film career finally seems to be winding down. He has been inactive since 1934, when he made The Private Life of Don Juan in England. He still keeps ferociously fit, but the domestic joys of his new marriage can be no substitute for the years of adulation in the 1920s, when his appearance with Mary Pickford would stop traffic in any city in the world.
- Hollywood, 13 March:
 Based on the novel by John Fox Jr., The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is an old-fashioned story of feuding hillbilly families. It has been filmed twice before by Paramount, the first version in 1915 being one of Cecil B. De Mille's early features. This time, the story has been given a big boost -- not only by a starry cast headed by Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney and Fred MacMurray, but by the addition of the new, three-strip Technicolor. Whereas the first pictures shot in this process, such as Becky Sharp and La Cucaracha, were studio-bound productions, here director Henry Hathaway and producer Walter Wanger have opted for substantial location shooting, and the natural outdoor settings look no less than stunning. From shots of the simple views of mountains, sky and forest, to the picturesque wooden houses and large waterwheel, the feel of this rough and primitive country is superbly captured by cinematographers Robert C. Bruce and W. Howard Greene. Unfortunately, the plot, dialogue and characterization are so weak that the fine actors make little impression.
- Paris, 31 March: Marcel Carné has started shooting Jenny, his first full-length film, in the Billancourt Studios. It stars Françoise Rosay, Lisette Lanvin, Albert Préjean and Charles Vanel. Director Jacques Feyder is on hand to advise his former assistant.
- Berlin, 31 March: Dr. Alfred Hugenberg, who has been under a cloud since he resigned from the Ministry of Economy, has now been ousted as head of the UFA trust. Goebbels has replaced him with a committee presided over by filmmaker Carl Froelich.
- Hollywood, 12 April: Release of Desire for Paramount, supervised and produced by Ernst Lubitsch, and directed by Frank Borzage with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper.
- Hollywood, 4 May:
 Frank Capra is currently the hottest director in Hollywood, and his latest picture, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, has had an ecstatic reception. Here Capra and his screenwriter Robert Riskin have fashioned a winning tale of the young hick Longfellow Deeds, a kind of grown-up version of Tom Sawyer played by Gary Cooper, who inherits $20 million and wants to give it all to the poor. Graham Greene has written that Cooper's performance is "subtle and pliable... something of which other directors have only dreamed." There are few, if any, more "natural" actors working in pictures today. And providing sterling support to Cooper is Jean Arthur, who plays the smart big-city reporter who tries to figure out what makes this unusual philanthropist tick. This is a populist film, hymning the innate decency of the common man at a time when the New Deal introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, of whom Capra is a great admirer, is grappling with the problems of the Depression. Whether the tide of cynicism and corruption so clearly seen by Capra can be turned back by the simple-minded sincerity of a wide-eyed hero is another matter altogether, but the director is determined that his films should have a "message."
- Paris, 15 May: The Mogador marks its debut as a first-run movie theater with the Parisian premiere of George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett with Katharine Hepburn.
- New York, 5 June:
 The first American film by the great German director Fritz Lang, Fury, has been successfully released. It stars Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney in a somber tale of a lyching. In 1933, following the banning of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse in Germany and Goebbels' suggestion that he become the head of the new Nazi cinema, Lang fled to Paris. After a brief sojourn in France, where he shot Liliom with Charles Boyer, the director accepted David O. Selznick's invitation to come to the US. Under contract to MGM, the monocle-wearing Lang familiarized himself with the local mores, learned English by talking to cab drivers, waitresses and gas station attendants, and lived for almost eight weeks with the Navajos. Many of his script suggestions were turned down until his adaptation of a four-page synopsis by Norman Krasna called Mob Rule was finally given the go-ahead by the studio. The shooting of Fury took place under some difficulties. Lang had to adapt to American methods of filming that were so different from German practices. Used to absolute control at UFA studios, he had no idea that union rules demanded that food and rest breaks were called for in his unrelenting schedule. Even Tracy sided with the hordes of extras who felt they were being exploited. Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz rewrote some of the dialogue, and MGM, imposing a happy ending on the film, prevented Lang from editing it. (Scenes showing blacks victimized by a gang of whites were cut.) Nevertheless, Fury is a powerful statement about an innocent man arrested as a suspected kidnapper, who escapes lynching, but returns to prove his innocence.
- Paris, 6 June: Striking workmen in Joinville are organizing free screenings in the studios to help pass the time.
- Hollywood, 26 June:
 MGM has a habit of hitting the screen with spectacular entertainment, and there's spectacle aplenty in the second half of the studio's San Francisco, which features the earthquake that devastated the city in 1906. The first half is some fluff about nightclub czar Clark Gable, one of his "chantoosies" Jeanette MacDonald and his boyhood chum Spencer Tracy. For the climactic quake in the second half, MGM special effects men A. Arnold Gillespie and James Basevi constructed full-size buildings on top of hydraulically operated rocker platforms. During filming the set shook and disintegrated, panicking the extras when the first tremors hit, but injuring no one as wall collapsed and bricks rained down.
- Berlin, 30 June: Carl Froelich is in the UFA studios to direct Das Schönheitsfleckschen, based on a short story by Alfred de Musset. The film stars Lil Dagover, Wolfgang Liebeneiner and Edith Oß. It is the first German fiction film to be shot in color using the Siemen's Opti-color process.
- Tokyo, 1 July: Creation of the Toho studios with a capital of ¥500,000.
 - Rome, 15 July: The church is worried about the bad moral influence that movies can have on a worldwide scale. The Pontifical Enclyclcal Vigilanti Cura, sent to American bishops, recommended the boycotting of indecent films and congratulated America's National Legion of Decency on their activites. Formed in 1933, the Legion reviews all new films before their release and classifies them under the headings "Passed," "Objectionable in Part," and "Condemned." These findings are announced from pulpits. Communicants of the Catholic church are exhorted to stay away from "partly objectionable" films, and are told that attendance at those "condemned" by the Legion would constitute a venial sin. Pope Pius XI is particularly concerned about the influences on youth, and has expressed his desire for a rigorous classification system. The demands of the Pope coincide with those of the Fascist censors, who are leaning toward a more edifying cinema. Above all else, the portrayal of women must be circumscribed. A heroine in a melodrama has to be a virgin, or faithful wife and mother.
- Moscow, 17 July: Release of a Lenfilm production Syn Monglii (Son of Mongolia), directed by Ilya Trauberg. The film, a mixture of fact and fiction, tells of a young horseman's quest for love.
- Le Havre, 20 July: The actress Marlene Dietrich has arrived in France. After spending a few days in Paris, she will go to London for the filming of Knight Without Armour, directed by Jacques Feyder, a spy drama set against a backdrop of the Great War, and co-starring Robert Donat.
- London, 20 July: After several months of effort, 20th Century-Fox's attempts to gain financial control of British Gaumont have failed. Fox has had to relinquish half of the already acquired shares to MGM.
- Hollywood, 22 July: Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon is a source of inspiration for scriptwriters: the second film version, Satan Met a Lady, directed by William Dieterle, was released here today.
- Mexico, 25 July: The young filmmaker of Austrian origin, Fred Zinnemann, has presented his documentary The Wave, co-directed and produced by Paul Strand. The influence of the Soviet cinema is omnipresent in both the content and artistic style of the film.
- Berlin, 17 August:
 Berlin's Olympic Games have finished. It was an occasion for Germany to show the world the power of Hitler's regime. Leni Riefenstahl was commissioned by the Führer to film the Games "as a song of praise to the ideals of National Socialism." To capture the great event, Riefenstahl had over 30 cameramen, as well as many planes and airships at her disposal. It will be edited into two parts -- the Festival of Nations and the Festival of Beauty -- and will be, in the director's words, "a hymn to the power and beauty of Man."
 - France, 20 August: What should have been a sunny rural idyll for Jean Renoir and his cast and team of friends, filming Une Partie de compagne (A Day in the Country) beside the river Loing in the Île de France, was dampened by one of the wettest summers for years. As a result, this screen adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant short story had to be abandoned, with only two sequences left to be shot. The director had been happy to make a film in the sort of location dear to the Impressionists, and to compose images worthy of his father's paintings. Reluctantly, Renoir has had to desert the countryside to take up work on The Lower Depths, for which he has been contracted. A story of urban squalor, it is based on the play by Maxim Gorky.
- Hollywood, 27 August:
 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers have attained the summit of their terpsichorean talents in Swing Tiime, which marks their sixth pairing since Flying Down to Rio three years ago. More than ever have the dancing duo of RKO musicals demonstrated their virtuosity. The number "Never Gonna Dance" has Fred trying to win Ginger over in dance. They hold each other closely, but she achingly spins away from him and the dance ends in separation. Their numbers are not merely the gems that stud rather simple stories, but, far more than dialogue, also trace the emotional development of the two characters and even advance the plot. For example, in order to get to meet dancing teacher Ginger, Fred pretends he can't dance a step. Plaming her for her pupil's two left feet, her boss fires her. Fred gets her job back by demonstrating the skills she has taught him in one lesson. The music is by Jerome Kern, a favorite composer of the two stars who have both danced, separately, in Kern shows on Broadway.
- Venice, 2 September: Jacques Feyder's Carnival in Flanders was voted best foreign film at the Festival here. Paul Muni was best actor for The Story of Louis Pasteur, and Annabella the best actress for Veille d'armes.
 - Paris, 2 September: Frenchman Henri Langlois is fighting to prevent the destruction of silent films, along with ensuring the existence of future safeguards of this country's rich cinematographic heritage. Thus he has just registered the constitution of a non-profit French Cinémathèque whose headquarters are located at the premises of Paul-Auguste Harlé's La Cinématographique Française. More than a year has passed since Harlé baked young Langlois' efforts. Now the Cinémathèque has become a vital link with the Cinema Circle film club founded by Langlois and Georges Franju last year. Harlé has been appointed president of the Cinémathèque, and Langlois and Franju are joint general secretaries.
- London, 14 September:
 The celebrated writer H. G. Wells has adapted his novel The Shape of Things to Come for the screen. The result is a visually superb science fiction film, Things to Come, directed by William Cameron Menzies and featuring Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott and Cedric Hardwicke , that takes a sobering look at the future and climaxes with humanity venturing into space.
 - Los Angeles, 15 September: "The Boy Wonder" of Hollywood, Irving Thalberg has died of pneumonia at the age of 37. The son of German-Jewish immigrants, he suffered ill-health from childhood and had a severe heart attack toward the end of 1932, which forced him to take off several months from MGM where he was production chief. Thalberg began his career as a humble secretary at Universal, but his exceptional qualities of judgment and organization led to a meteoric rise that prompted Carl Laemmle to appoint him to head of production before he was much past age 20. At Universal, the toughness beneath his frail exterios was evidenced in his stormy confrontations with Erich von Stroheim over Foolish Wives and Merry-Go-Round, a situation that later repeated itself at MGM over the editing of Greed. Thalberg and Laemmle fell out early in 1923 when the former refused to marry the latter's daughter. The young tyro joined Louis B. Mayer and, with the formation of MGM in 1924, he became the new studio's production chief, marrying actress Norma Shearer in 1927. He wielded immense power as a brilliant hands-on producer and his loss will be keenly felt. He leaves behind a fortune estimated in the millions.
- Paris, 19 September:
 For having stolen a few francs, a young lad is deprived of mushrooms for dinner, and thus escapes from the poisoning that destroys his whole family: so begins Le Roman d'un tricheur (The Story of a Cheat), Sacha Guitry's new film, which can be seen at the Marignon. Adapted by the director himself from his own novel published in 1934, the film is a stylish and witty comedy about the art of cheating, which nevertheless ends on a moral note. The story is narrated in the first person by Guitry himself, who portrays the character of a repentant conman in his own inimitable way.
- Tokyo, 15 October: Kenji Mizoguchi continues to examine the destiny of Japanese women. In his new work Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion), he depicts the unhappy life of two geishas whose fate depends on the desires of men.
- Los Angeles, 1 November: Release of Charge of the Light Brigade, made by Michael Curtiz and starring the popular Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland.
- Paris, 5 November: Since its release in October, Le Roi (The King), by Pierre Colombier, with Victor Francen, Gaby Morlan, Raimu and Elvira Popesco, has beaten all box-office records at the Marivaux Cinema.
 - New York, 10 November:
 Unhappy with The Bohemian Girl, their last film made for Hal Roach, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy decided to break out on their own. It was Stan who wanted more control over their pictures, and set up Stan Laurel Productions. The first one released under this banner, Our Relations, is also one of their best. In it, Stan and Ollie play themselves and their twin brothers, Alfie Laurel and Bert Hardy, causing double trouble when they turn up at different times at Denker's Beer Garden. It is impossible to describe the twists and turns of this comedy of errors, but, needless to say, it is hilarious.
- Rome, 17 November: The president of the MPPDA, Will H. Hays, has received an audience with Pope Pius XI.
- Paris, 7 December: Erich von Stroheim is in the capital to appear in Marthe Richard, under the direction of Raymond Bernard, with Edwige Feuillère.
- Paris, 7 December: A gala showing of the uncut version of Abel Gance's Un Grand amour de Beethoven (The Life and Loves of Beethoven), with Harry Baur, Annie Ducaux and Janny Holt. Music lovers were reserved in their opinion of the film, but it was applauded by the critics.
- Paris, 22 December:
 The first ever winner of the Prix Louis Delluc, created on the initiative of the group of Young Independent Critics in homage to the critic and director who died in 1924, is Jean Renoir's Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths). The film won by three votes over Marcel Carné's Jenny. Among the panel of judges were Marcel Archard, Maurice Bessy, Claude Aveline, Pierre Bost, Henri Jeanson and Georges Altman. In one sense, the prize is meant to counterbalance the academicism of the Grand Prix du Cinéma Français. The Prix Louis Delluc will try to reflect the tastes of the man who first coined the word "cinéaste" (meaning filmmaker), and one of the first critics to consider film as an art form and work out a theory. Delluc would certainly have approved of The Lower Depths with its flowing camerawork, superb sets and locations, and splendid performances, particularly from Louis Jouvet and Jean Gabin. Although ostensibly situated in Moscow, the movie is very French in flavor. Accoring to Renoir, "I was not trying to make a Russian film. I wanted to make a human drama based on Gorky's play."
- New York, 29 December: The National Board of Review has selected Jacques Feyder's Carnival in Flanders as its film of the year. The French film even beat Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.
 - London, 31 December: The year ends with some revealing polls as to who are the most popular stars. And from the studios' point of view, of course, this means WHO equals Big Bucks at the Box Office! Especially interesting is the fact that America's favorites are not necessarily tops with the rest of the world. The major Quigley poll, whose results were published in Variety last week, list the US Top Ten, starting from No. 1 as follows: juvenile curly-top Shirley Temple, dashing he-man Clark Gable, dancing duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, handsome Robert Taylor, jug-faced comedian Joe E. Brown, somber Dick Powell, glamorous Joan Crawford, sparkling Claudette Colbert, songbird Jeanette MacDonald and perennial favorite Gary Cooper. Precocious moppet Temple supersedes glamour and sex appeal outside the US as well, but gorgeous Gary Cooper moves in to No. 2 elsewhere while Robert Taylor drops down to 10, with Charlie Chaplin, Garbo, Dietrich, diva Grace Moore and the Fat Man and the Thin Man -- Laurel and Hardy -- joining the world popularity list from No. 5 to No. 9. The top international box-office film for the year was Chaplin's Modern Times, MGM's W. S. Van Dyke is the director who brought in the most dollars for his combined output (which included both San Francisco and Rose-Marie), and finally the New York Film Critics voted Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as the year's best film.
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9 May - Birkenhead, Cheshire, England,