- Moscow, 1 January: The exiled Polish filmmakers Jerzy Bossak and Aleksander Ford have created the Avant-Garde Cinema company with the goal of making filmed reports on the Polish stuggle and the work of the partisans.
- Hollywoood, 1 January: At the request of the American government, Warner Bros. have given up plans to make a biographical film of Charles de Gaulle. The tension between de Gaulle and Roosevelt appears to be the reason for this change of mind.
- New York, 4 January:
 Clinching proof that the war has regenerated British cinema is provided by a superb new picture, In Which We Serve, written and produced by Noël Coward, who also stars and co-directs with former film editor David Lean. Coward plays Captain Kinross, the commander of the warship HMS Torrin, a part closely modeled on his friend Louis Mountbatten, whose own ship Kelly was sunk off Crete in 1941. The story of the Torrin and her crew is told in flashback, after her own sinking, and is notable for giving even-handed treatment to the ship's officers and men.
- Paris, 12 January: Movie theaters now have to close on Tuesdays to economize on electricity, and studios are ordered to cease all activity for two days a week.
- New York, 20 January: Director Alfred Hitchcock's latest thriller, Shadow of a Doubt, marks a quite radical departure from his previous Hollywood productions. An intimate, low-keyed drama, it is most remarkable for its highly original and slightly off-beat evocation of life in a back-water American town, achieved by shooting much of the film on location in a real California podunk far from the studio back-lot. Hitchcock said, "I am extremely anxious to avoid the conventional small-town American scene and the stock figures that have been seen in so many films." The director collaborated closely with writer Thornton Wilder on the brilliant script that is about a charming and handsome man (Joseph Cotten), arriving in town to visit his relatives, who turns out to be a murderer on the run. Tension mounts to a hair-raising climax as his niece (Teresa Wright) grows increasingly suspicious of her "Uncle Charlie" and fears for her own life.
 - New York, 23 January: With considerable commercial acumen, Warner Brothers have delayed the release of their espionage melodrama Casablanca to coincide with the big Allied conference in the same North African city. The screen Casablanca is not the thriving modern metropolis but an exotic hotbed of spies, black marketeers, refugees and Gestapo men where "everybody goes to Rick's." And presiding over Rick's Café Americain is Humphrey Bogart's disillusioned gun-runner Richard Blaine, a bruised idealist haunted by the bittersweet memory of a fleeting Paris romance with Ingrid Bergman. Her sudden reappearance at Rick's, and request for pianist Dooley Wilson to play "As Time Goes By," tests the tortured Rick's loyalty to the limit. Director Michael Curtiz handles a swirl of subplots and salty supporting players with great aplomb: twitchy little black marketeer Peter Lorre; Sydney Greenstreet's massively amiable fixer; Claude Rains as an elegantly amoral Vichy chief of police, rounding up "the usual suspects;" and Conrad Veidt's reptilian Nazi. This is hokum of the very highest class, set in a chiaroscuro never-never land that grips from the movie's opening montage. As director Curtiz has told Jack Warner, "The scenario isn't the exact truth, but we have the facts to prove it."
- Rome, 31 January:
 Ossessione has annoyed the intellectual and social elite of Roma. For many months a sense of mystery has surrounded Luchino Visconti's first feature film. The 36-year-old Milanese aristocrat is known for his affiliations with young anti-fascists and has worked at the Centro Spermentale de Cinematografia and on the magazine Cinema. It was Jean Renoir who had advised Visconti to adapt James Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice for the screen. Visconti has pulled no punches in the telling of this tragic story, a style that the critic Antonio Pietrangeli has labeled "neo-realist."
- Paris, 3 February: Release of a brilliantly executed comedy L'Honorable Catherine, from director Marcel L'Herbier and starring Edwige Feuillère.
- France, 3 February: For a period of a week, a percentage of all box-office takings thoughout the country will be sent to the National Aid organization for war victims.
 - Los Angeles, 5 February: A huge uproar has broken out over the premiere of RKO's The Outlaw, a bizarre Western that was designed to launch Jane Russell, the most recent "discovery" of the millionaire movie dilletante and all-round odd-ball Howard Hughes. He built the entire production around Russell's magnificent breasts, even designing a special brassiere to enhance her dizzying cleavage. The censors and the Catholic League of Decency have forced the film's withdrawal.
- Los Angeles, 6 February: Errol Flynn has been found not guilty of the accusation of corruption of a minor, after a trial that lasted 21 days. The charge was made by two adolescents.
- Hollywood, 6 February: Disney releases the 43-minute Saludos, Amigos, a mixture of live action and animation, in which Donald Duck and Jose Carioca go to South America and present four animated shorts inspired by their trip.
- France, 7 February: A member of a group of resistants, Robert Lynen, the young actor who played Poil-de-Carotte at age 11, has been arrested by the Germans. He has been imprisoned in Marseilles.
- Paris, 8 February: Gilles Grangier has made Ademal, bandit d'honneur, produced by the Associated Prisoners' film company, a new company created by recently released prisoners.
- Berlin, 5 March:
 Baron Munchhausen, a delightful, entertaining new fantasy and adventure film, starring Hans Albers in the title role, has taken three years to reach the screen. The project was first set in motion by Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who wanted to celebrate UFA's 25th anniversary with a suitably spectacular Agfacolor production. The public is going to love it.
- Los Angeles, 18 March: Premier of George Cukor's Keeper of the Flame, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
- New York, 19 March: Eight of Al Capone's accomplices have been charged with extorting $2.5 million from the Cinema Technicians Union.
- Tokyo, 25 March: Release of director Akira Kurosawa's first film, Sugata Sanshiro (Judo Saga), with Susumu Fujita and Takashi Shimura.
- Hollywood, 26 March: Release of Hello, Frisco, Hello, with Alice Faye, John Payne, Jack Oakie, Lynn Bari, Laird Cregar and June Havoc.
- New York, 9 April: Release of Cabin in the Sky, directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Ethel Waters, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong and Rex Ingram.
 - London, 12 April: The British documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, a graduate of the inflential GPO Film Unit, has paid poetic tribute to the efforts of London's Auxililiary Fire Service at the time of the Blitz in Fires Were Started. The film follows the integration of a new volunteer (played by novelist William Sansom) into a fire team during the night of a heavy bombing raid. Jennings evokes the dirt and danger of their work with a stream of striking images as the firemen fight to stop a docklands blaze from spreading to a munitions ship.
- Vichy, 15 April: A decree requires distributors and theaters to give priority to short films of "national interest."
- Italy, 16 April: Fascist authorities have seized all copies of Luchino Visconti's earthy film, Ossessione.
- Hollywood, 21 April: Release of I Walked With a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur for Val Lewton at RKO.
- Hollywood, 10 May: An opinion poll carried out by the Motion Picture Herald has shown that the public is saturated with war films and is demanding moviews that distract and entertain.
- New York, 26 May:
 Director Billy Wilder has cast bullet-headed Erich von Stroheim as the dashing Desert Fox, General Erwin Rommel, in Paramount's new Five Graves to Cairo. The film is a re-working of the 1939 Hotel Imperial. Here British agent Franchot Tone infiltrates Akim Tamiroff's German-occupied desert inn to uncover the secrets of Rommel's supply dumps before the Battle of El Alamein.
- Los Angeles, 27 May: RKO has released This Land Is Mine, a film about the French Resistance shot entirely on studio sets, starring Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara and George Sanders.
 - New York, 27 May: Since America's declaration of war against Germany, Hollywood has felt free to produce various anti-German films. A few months after Fritz Lang brought out Hangmen Also Die, based on a story by Bertolt Brecht and set in Czechoslovakia after the assassination of Heydrich, a new film by Jean Renoir is now contributing to the anti-Nazi cause. This Land Is Mine tells of a cowardly, mother-dominated schoolteacher (Charles Laughton) who is secretly in love with a colleague (Maureen O'Hara). She is engaged to a railway superindendent (George Sanders), who betrays her brother and resistance fighter (Kent Smith) to a Nazi major (Walter Slezak). Laughton finally gets up enough backbone to speak out against the enemy and is arrested. Such phrases as "sabotage is the only weapon left to a free people" as well as the film's condemnation of collaboration are extremely effective and necessary in the propaganda war.
- Paris, 31 May: Jean Grémillon is on location at the airport in Le Bourget for his latest film Le Ciel est à vous (The Woman Who Dared).
- California, 16 June:
 At a quiet ceremony in south Burbank, the 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin has married for the fourth time. His bride is 18-year-old Oona O'Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill. The couple met at a dinner party in Hollywood in the spring of 1942 at a time when Oona was trying to launch her acting career. The delicately beautiful young woman had already tested for a part in an Anna Sten vehicle. Chaplin, who was then considering filming Paul Vincent Carroll's play Shadow and Substance, offered the gazelle-like O'Neill a contract. By the time the project was shelved at the end of the year, Chaplin was passionately in love with O'Neill, captivated by her beauty, intelligence and reticence. They decided to get married as soon as Oona turned 18. The ceremony, news of which was broken exclusively by the columnist Louella Parsons, was conducted in great secrecy. The only hitch came when the elderly minister registered Chaplin's name as Chapman, a mistake that was quickly rectified. The couple are now incommunicado somewhere in Santa Barbara, hunted by a pack of reporters. However, Eugene O'Neill, who strongly disapproves of this marriage, has cut communications with his daughter.
- Paris, 21 June: A devastating fire has destroyed the France-Actualité's film library and all the editing studios at the Buttes-Chaumont.
- Paris, 23 June:
 Robert Bresson's first full-length film, Les Anges du péché (Angels of the Streets), has a very original tone. Using a screenplay by Father Raymond-Leopold Bruckberger and Jean Giraudoux, the film succeeds in being religious without falling into religiosity. It tells the story of rich young Anne-Marie (Renée Fauré), who thinks she has found her vocation when she joins a Dominican convent as a novice. The convent specializes in rehabilitating female prisoners, and Anne-Marie becomes especially fascinated with Therese (Jany Holt), trying to get her to join the convent to redeem her for her sins - but Therese protests her innocence. However, when released, Therese shoots the man who committed the crime for which she was imprisoned, then joins the convent, where she is reluctant to tell anyone her secret, least of all Anne-Marie. Meanwhile, outside the convent, a police search is widening... The rigor and intensity of the direction and acting overcome some of the more melodramatic aspects of the plot.
 - New York, 14 July: The publicity for For Whom the Bell Tolls promises audiences "168 minutes of Romance and Suspense that will leave you Breathless!" It was Ernest Hemingway who suggested that the part of the American adventurer from his Spanish Civil War novel be taken by Gary Cooper. The role of the woman with whom he falls in love initially went to Vera Zorina who, fortunately, was replaced by Ingrid Bergman. The latter has created a sensation by not plucking her eyebrows and having her hair cut very short.
- New Delhi, 17 July: As the British sources of supply are uncertain due to the war in Europe, the government is now rationing unexposed negative. All advertising films are forbidden.
- London, 26 July:
 The writer-director team of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell have now brought cartoonist David Low's Colonel Blimp to the screen in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The screen Blimp is Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy, the doughty old tusker whose life we follow from impetuous youth to blustering old age. Powell had wanted Laurence Olivier, now serving in the Fleet Air Arm, to play the title role, but he was not available. He was replaced by Roger Livesey, who gives a brilliantly observed portrait of a hidebound but good-natured old bumbler. Strong support is provided by Anton Walbrook as Livesey's German friend and Deborah Kerr, red-haired a ravishing as the three different women in Wynne-Candy's life. However, this densely layered and intensely personal national epic has been attacked by critics for being out of touch with the mood of wartime Britain. And Prime Minister Winston Churchill has made an unsuccessful bid to have the film banned for export on the grounds that so sympathetic a portrait of such a reactionary character would be bad for morale.
- Hollywood, 29 July: Release of This Is the Army from Warner Bros. Michael Curtiz directs George Murphy, Joan Leslie and George Tobias in this screen adaptation of Irving Berlin's Broadway musical.
- Paris, 3 August: The Commercial court for the Seine has endorsed the Pathé-Cinéma company's recovery by certifying the payment of their debts.
- Los Angeles, 11 August: Release of Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait with Gene Tierney, Don Ameche and Charles Coburn.
- France, 12 August: German authorities have forbidden all filming in the coastal zones.
- Hollywood, 22 August: The studios are dubbing their recent films in French and Italian with the play to distribute them in Europe after the war.
- Los Angeles, 27 August: Release of Watch on the Rhine from Warner Bros. Herman Shumlin directs Bette Davis, Paul Lukas, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Beulah Bondi and George Coulouris in this screen adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play.
- New York, 27 August: Universal releases the Technicolor remake of The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Arthur Lubin, with Nelson Eddy as Anatole, Susanna Foster as Christine, and Claude Rains as the horribly disfigured Phantom, Erik Claudin.
- Santa Monica, 7 September:
 "Orson Welles has shot into my life like a comet trailing fire," says Rita Hayworth, who has just become the Boy Wonder's second wife. (He divorced his first, Virginia Nicholson, in 1939.) Rita met the brilliant young director at a private film showing last spring, and they have been inseparable ever since. In July and August they entertained troops on a morale-boosting tour. Rita has taken a stimulating route on the way to her rendezvous with Welles, much to the exasperation of Columbia boss Harry Cohn, who has tried, without a great deal of success, to direct her personal affairs. After the collapse of her marriage to businessman Ed Judson, she has been successively "engaged" to Victor Mature, her co-star in My Gal Sal, Gilbert Roland, Howard Hughes, Tony Martin and, last but not least, British star David Niven. The wedding, as befits two of Hollywood's most glamorous figures, was a glittering affair, and Hayworth, at her most sumptuous, drew an eight-column headline trumpeting, "The Marriage of Beauty and the Brain."
- Nice, 9 September: Fighting in Italy has forced studios to close. The shooting of two films has been interrupted: La Boîte aux rêves (The Case of Dreams), by Yves Allégret, and Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), by Marcel Carné.
 - Hollywood, 25 September: Thank Your Lucky Stars is a bumper package of star turns designed to bring entertainment into the lives of soldiers overseas as well as the families they have left behind. On the hook of a slender plot, featuring Dennis Morgan as a singer trying to get Eddie Cantor to put him on his show, are hung appearances by Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, John Garfield, Ida Lupino and Olivia De Havilland, among a host of other Warner Brothers stars.
- Paris, 28 September:
 The second feature film from Henri-Georges Clouzot, Le Corbeau (The Raven), is a vitriolic look at French provincial life. It tells of a spate of poison-pen letters from someone ("the raven" of the title) who knows the secrets of the recipients, and the effect it has on those small-town inhabitants. Produced with German capital, the film has avoided Vichy censorship, though rumors regarding its showing in Germany under the title A Small French Town are unfounded.
- Washington, 30 September: Clark Gable, who enlisted as a lieutenant in the Air Corps, has been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.
- Los Angeles, 10 October: Release of Lassie Come Home, with Donald Crisp, Dame May Whitty, Edmund Gwenn, Nigel Bruce and Elsa Lanchester, and featuring MGM child stars Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor.
- Lisbon, 12 October: Antonio Lopes Ribeiro, generally considered to the the "official" filmmaker for the Salazar regime, has released Amor de perdiçao.
- Rome, 30 October: Young scriptwriter Federico Fellini has married the actress Giulietta Masina. The newlyweds are both 23 years old.
- Moscow, 1 November: Release of Jdi menya (Wait for Me), by Alexander Stolper and Boris Ivanov. It is the first film about love rather than heroic deeds of war to be made since the fighting began.
- New York, 4 November: The Goldwyn Company releases the jolly Stalinist musical, The North Star, with a Lillian Hellman script directed by Lewis Milestone, and featuring Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Ann Harding, Jane Withers, Farley Granger and Erich von Stroheim.
- Los Angeles, 15 December: MGM re-teams Mrs. Miniver's Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in Madame Curie, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and featuring fellow Miniver alums Henry Travers and Dame May Whitty.
- New York, 24 December: Release of Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, starring Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda, with Benny Goodman, Charlotte Greenwood and Edward Everett Horton.
- Los Angeles, 27 December: Henry King has made The Song of Bernadette, based on Franz Werfel's book, with Jennifer Jones, Charles Bickford, and Vincent Price.
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9 February - Newark, NJ,