- London, 18 January: The Rank Organisation has created a production company, J. Arthur Rank Productions Ltd., with its base at Pinewood. This is an impressive addition to the number of studios, laboratories and cinema companies already set up by the organization since 1935.
- Moscow, 16 January:
 Sergei Eisenstein has already directed many great films, but Ivan the Terrible is an immediate masterpiece. After the German attack of 22 June 1941, the Mosfilm Studio was evacuated to Almo-Ata in Central Asia. There the filmmakers improvised in precarious conditions with courage and imagination. Because of the resounding success of Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein was trusted to make another historical drama, this time about the 16th-century Czar Ivan IV, who created a unified Russia from a collection of feudal holdings. Eisenstein began shooting the first part of the three-part epic after more than two years of research, making sketches of every scene of the film.
Ivan the Terrible is a spectacular fresco about the seizure of power by Prince Ivan. While still a child, Ivan hears of the assassination of his mother and understands that he is in the hands of the ambitious boyars. Finally reaching his majority, he has himself crowned Czar. By this action, he shows his will to reign singlehandedly and enlarge Russia. He achieves this in winning various rebellions and taking the town of Kazan from the Tartars. But his aunt Euphrosyne conspires against him and poisons his beloved wife Anastasia, and his best friend betrays him. He leaves Moscow in disgust, but the people find him and bring him back. The film ends with crowds on their knees. It is difficult to know what to admire most: the strength of the dialogue, the beauty of Prokofiev's music, the majestic images created by the photography of both Andrei Moskvin and Eduard Tissé, or the magnificent performance by Nikolai Cherkassov (who had played Alexander Nevsky) as the fierce Czar. Now back in Moscow, Eisenstein is preparing the second part of Ivan the Terrible.
- Los Angeles, 3 February: Walt Disney gave a preview of his new cartoon feature, The Three Caballeros, with Donald Duck, Pablo Penguin, José Carioca and the bird Aracua, "the clown of the jungle."
- Paris, 11 February: Louis Jouvet and his troupe are once more on French soil after an absence of four years in South America. Jacques Feyder has already approached him for a role in the film Talleyrand.
- California, 15 February: Olivia De Havilland has won a landmark decision in her case against Warner Bros. The studios were trying to bind the actress, whom they had earlier suspended for rebellious behavior, to an extra six months. The Supreme Court has now set the outside limit of a studio-player contract at seven years, including periods of suspension.
- New York, 1 March: Release of The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Albert Lewin. This adaptation of Oscar Wilde's famous novel stars Hurd Hatfield as the tormented anti-hero, with George Sanders, Donna Reed and Angela Lansbury in support.
- Paris, 9 March:
 The premiere of Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du paradis) was given at a gala evening at the Palais de Chaillot. Marcel Carné's uncommonly long film (almost three hours) received a lukewarm welcome, no doubt on account of the terrible acoustics in the hall as well as the anxiety of many in the audience, who did not want to miss the last metro. Both parts of the film - Le Boulevard du crime and L'Homme blanc -- will be released exclusively at the Madeleine and the Colisée and shown at a single performance. Given the dearth of quality entertainment, it seems certain that the public will take to it heartily. It is, in fact, an exceptional film: a richly entertaining and intensely romantic evocation of an epoch.
The tale unfolds against a meticulously reconstructed setting of mid-19th-century Paris, in the milieu of the popular theater. It tells of the doomed love between the famous mime Deburau and the beautiful courtesan named Garance, unforgettably played by Jean-Louis Barrault and Arletty, respectively. And the cast around this couple is prestigious: Pierre Brasseur as the classical actor Frederick Lemaître, Marcel Herrand as the poet-assassin Lacenaire, Louis Salou as the aristocrat Comte Montray, and also Pierre Renoir, Marcel Pérès and Gaston Modot, as well as the young Maria Casarès, making her screen debut. All their fates are intertwined among the crowds that throng the boulevards. Naturally, the brilliant and ironic scenario and dialogue is by Jacques Prévert. As was the case with Les Visiteurs du soir, Alexander Trauner (the vivid sets) and Joseph Kosma (the haunting music) were uncredited, because of their Jewish origin. After the success of the previous film, the producer André Paulvé gave director Carné carte blanche to compose his vast fresco. After many months of preparation, the shooting was ready to begin in mid-August 1943 at the Victorine studios in Nice. But the American landings in Sicily interrupted work because the team was ordered by authorities to return to Paris. The project was purchased by Pathé who controlled it well. The larger-then-life characters, narrative skill and the sweep of the production make it a triumph.
- Hollywood, 13 March: The strike by 15,000 machinists and technicians has paralyzed all activity in the studios.
- Hollywood, 15 March:
 Bing Crosby (Best Actor), Barry Fitzgerald (Best Supporting Actor), Leo McCarey (Best Director, Best Original Story), and Frank Butler and Frank Cavett (Best Screenplay) received Oscars® for Going My Way, which won the Best Picture award. This heart-warming story about a Catholic priest is a popular winner, as is Ingrid Bergman, the Best Actress for Gaslight.
- Copenhagen, 23 March: Carl Dreyer has given a preview of a film he made in Sweden, Tva Manniskor (Two People).
- Los Angeles, 24 March: Friz Freleng has finished making his latest cartoon, Life With Feathers, for Warner Bros.' "Merrie Melodies" series. It features a new loveable cartoon character named Sylvester the cat.
- Paris, 4 April: The Clichy Palace cinema, which specializes in American films for the Allied forces, is screening a copy of Marcel Carné's Les Visiteurs du soir, with English subtitles and renamed The Devil's Envoy.
- Paris, 14 April: All city movie theaters and other places of entertainment will be shut today as a mark of respect for the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. His funeral takes place today in Washington, DC.
- Berlin, 17 April: In the middle of the last desperate days of fighting, Goebbels is reported to have said at a conference with the Propaganda Ministry that: "Gentlemen, a hundred years from now, a wonderful color film will be shown about these terrible days we are going through. Stand firm today, so that the audience does not whistle you down when you appear on the screen in a hundred years' time."
- Paris, 25 April: Actress Micheline Presle has interrupted the shooting of Christian-Jaque's film Boule-de-suif to marry Michel Lefort, the tennis champion and Bordeaux wine merchant.
- Grasse, 28 April: An extra was killed by a bullet wound in the chest during takes for Jeff Musso's film Vive la liberté (a stroke of irony: the film's original title was We Killed a Man).
- New York, 3 May:
 Following on last year's string of musical successes for MGM, Judy Garland is reunited with Meet Me in St. Louis director Vincente Minnelli for The Clock. This small-scale and poignant film tells of a girl and a soldier who meet for the first time in New York City, fall in love, and marry -- all in the space of the GI's 48-hour leave. Playing opposite a well-cast Robert Walker, 23-year-old Judy moves and beguiles the audience with a thoroughly sincere and convincing performance. What is really worth noting, however, is that she does it without singing a note. It seems that this exceptional musical star is now likely to develop into a straight dramatic actress.
- Prague, 12 May: Jiri Trnka and sever collaborators have created an animation unit, "Trick Brothers" (Batri v Triku).
- Paris, 18 May: Premiere of Max Ophüls' From Mayerling to Sarajevo, with Edwige Feuillère. Work on the film began in 1939, was interrupted by the war, then finished in the spring of 1940, only to be banned by the Germans.
- Italy, 23 May: The actress Corinne Luchaire has been arrested in the company of her mother and father, the journalist and collaborator Jean Luchaire, who had become a minister in the exiled Laval Government.
- Los Angeles, 6 June: A two-year legal battle has ended for Charles Chaplin. The court has ordered him to pay $100 a week for the maintenance of the small daughter of 26-year-old actress Joan Barry, who was briefly under contract to Chaplin in 1942. In June 1943 Barry had filed a paternity suit against Chaplin. In February 1944, blood tests proved conclusively that Chaplin could not be the father of Barry's child, but after two paternity trials the court defied logic and ruled that Chaplin had to pay child support. Chaplin's motion for retrial has been denied.
- Los Angeles, 15 June: Singer-actres Judy Garland, who divorced David Rose in 1944, has married the film director Vincente Minnelli. They have just made The Clock together in New York.
- Prague, 11 August: The National Union government has decreed the nationalization of the country's film production. From today, all film companies have become State property under the name Statny Film.
- Rome, 24 September:
 Scarcely six months have passed since the war ended, so perhaps it is too soon to show the public such a neo-realistic narrative as that of Rome, Open City (Roma Città Aperta). The preview of Roberto Rossellini's film was greeted coldly. Romans could not tolerate seeing again so soon the events of the winter of 1944. This story centers around the last days of the German occupation of Italy when a Resistance leader, Manfredi (Marcel Pagliero), fleeing the Gestapo, is given refuge by the pregnant Pina (Anna Magnani). When she is shot, he takes shelter with a good-time girl (Maria Michi), who betrays him. Manfredi and a priest (Aldo Fabrizi) are arrested and executed. In his use of a documentary approach, filming in the streets and apartments of Rome, Rossellini has achieved an immediacy seldom seen before.
 - Paris, 17 October: The singular charm of Micheline Presle has given her top billing since she appeared in Abel Gance's Paradise Lost in 1939. But only now has she managed to shake off the label of the frivolous Parisian that categorized her. Four months ago we discovered her as a passionate woman in Jacques Becker's Falbalas opposite Raymond Rouleau, from whom she had learned much about acting. Now she is playing a very different part -- that of the good-hearted prostitute -- in Boule-de-suif, directed by Christian-Jaque, and based on Guy de Maupassant's story.
- Hollywood, 25 October:
 Since leaving MGM for Warner Brothers in 1943, Joan Crawford has been absent from the screen, save for a brief appearance in the 1944 Hollywood Canteen. Now she returns with her blistering performance in Mildred Pierce, directed by Michael Curtiz. She takes the title role of a relentlessly over-achieving career woman, suffering as only Crawford can at the hands of lizard-like Zachary Scott and her poisonous brat of a daughter Ann Blyth.
- Hollywood, 1 November: Alfred Hitchcock has presented his latest thriller, the psychoanalytical melodrama Spellbound, from the novel by Francis Beeding, with actor Gregory Peck showing a darker side of his persona, and Ingrid Bergman. Salvador Dali has designed a striking dream sequence.
- Paris, 14 November: On Abel Gance's return from Spain, the film magazine Paris-Cinéma published the following warning: "Silent partners beware! -- lock up your deposit boxes."
 - Hollywood, 16 November: Dapper Paramount leading man Ray Milland has stepped out of character to play failed alcoholic writer Don Birnam in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. Adapted from Charles Jackson's harrowing novel, it paints an uncompromising picture of self-destruction, with the haggard, unshaven Milland lurching up New York's Third Avenue trying to hock his typewriter, unaware that all the pawnshops are closed for Yom Kippur. This scene was shot on location one Sunday, with Milland staggering from 55th Street to 110th Street while Wilder's camera filmed from inside a bakery truck.
Whether shrinking from imaginary bats as he succumbs to the horror of delirium tremens, or slyly finding new places to hide bottles from girlfriend Jane Wyman, Milland is a revelation as a man trapped by the hazy romance of booze. Telling support is provided by Howard da Silva as a world-weary bartender and Frank Faylen as a sadistic nurse in the alcoholic ward in Bellevue hospital. Even the somewhat glib "happy ending," in which Milland is hauled back from the brink by Wyman, cannot dent the impact of this powerful picture. During its Santa Barbara previews, The Lost Weekend was greeted with laughter and cards that said that it was tasteless. The studio considered shelving the film, and there was even an alleged report that the mobster Frank Costello, acting on behalf of the liquor industry, had offered Paramount $5 million for the negative so that it could be destroyed. But Paramount President Barney Balaban, figuring that it was futile to make expensive movies and then shelve them, gave the go-ahead to release the picture.
- London, 22 November:
 Sardonic, sexy James Mason is currently the hottest property in British cinema. Mason's powerful brand of sadistic charm was given full rein in Gainsborough's The Seventh Veil, in which he played the crippled guardian of concert pianist Ann Todd, bringing his cane crashing down on her fingers in a frenzy of impotent rage. In The Wicked Lady, he is Captain Terry Jackson, a dashing 17th-century highwayman who acquires a stimulating partner in the form of adventuress Margaret Lockwood. This racy example of "Gainsborough Gothic" proved too much for US censors, and Lockwood's plunging cleavage had to be adjusted for American audiences.
 - London, 26 November: The latest collaboration between Noël Coward and David Lean has produced Brief Encounter, which is based on one of Coward's prewar one-act plays. It's a tender suburban love story in which a speck of dirt in the eye leads to a doomed romance between housewife Celia Johnson and married doctor Trevor Howard. Much of the affair is played out in the steamy fog of a railway station buffet, where the couple snatch fretful hours away from the respective spouses, their middle-class reticence counterpointed by Lean's use of Rachmaninoff's lush Second Piano Concerto. Critics have drawn comparisons with French cinema, but Brief Encounter is very English.
- Paris, 19 December: Pathé-Cinéma are celebrating the 52nd week of exclusive screening for Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise).
- Paris, 22 December: Georges Rouquier has finished shooting Farrebique in the Aveyron district. The family chronicle took almost a year to film.
- Copenhagen, 26 December: Release of De Rode Enge (The Red Earth), directed by Bodil Ipsen and Lau Lauritzen Jr., with Lisbeth Movin and Paul Reichhardt. A gripping account of the Danish resistance.
- Hollywood, 28 December:
 Bing Crosby's career continues to sail "straight down the middle." In his new The Bells of St. Mary's, Leo McCarey's smash-hit sequel to Going My Way -- made for contractual reasons at RKO -- we can follow the further adventures of Bing's Father O'Malley, here saving a school with the help of Sister Superior Ingrid Bergman and warbling a few songs in between. As he tells Ingrid, "If you're ever in trouble, dial O for O'Malley."
- New York, 28 December: "Gable's Back and Garson's Got Him!" Thus reads the tagline for MGM's new release Adventure, directed by Victor Fleming. In his first film since returning from the war, Clark Gable plays a sea-going roustabout who falls for Greer Garson's meek librarian. The supporting cast includes Joan Blondell, Thomas Mitchell and Tom Tully.
- Los Angeles, 30 December: Film critics have hailed Frank Borzage's newly released film The Spanish Main, which stars Maureen O'Hara and Paul Henreid, as a wonderful adventure film. It was shot in Technicolor.
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17 February - Dublin, Ireland,