- London, 1 January: The distinguished actor, Alec Guinness, a star of both stage and screen, has been honored with a knighthood in the Queen's New Year's List.
- New York, 1 January: The MPAA has repealed a 1957 ruling that forbids persons sympathetic to communism, or those who refused to give evidence to the HUAC, from being nominated for an Academy Award.
- Los Angeles, 16 January: In a television interview, the formerly blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo has revealed that he is the author, under the pseudonym of Robert Rich, of the screenplay for The Brave One, which won the 1956 Oscar® for Best Motion Picture Story. Nobody at the time came forward to receive the statuette.
- Spain, 25 January: The filming of Solomon and Sheba is dogged with disaster and tragedy. Following Tyrone Power's death from a heart attack during filming last November, Spanish actor Luis Santana accidently set himself on fire today by dropping an oil lamp on his clothes.
- Paris, 13 February:
 Concha Perez, the beautiful, seductive heroine of Pierre Louys' novel La Femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) has previously been protrayed on the screen by Conchita Montenegro in 1929, in a film directed by Jacques de Baroncelli, and unforgettably by Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman in 1935. Now it's the turn of Brigitte Bardot, today's sex goddess, to play this mythical and mysterious femme fatale in La Femme et le pantin. While retaining the Spanish location -- the hot atmosphere of the Seville festival -- director Julien Duvivier has now updated the story, and has transformed the film's heroine into a French girl who is raised in Spain. Bardot remains a provocative creature who drives men mad.
 - Hollywood, 13 February: Less than two weeks after shooting began on Spartacus in Death Valley, California, Kirk Douglas, executive producer and principal actor of the film, has fired Anthony Mann as director. The star has decided to replace him with the 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick, who had directed Douglas in the brilliant anti-war movie Paths of Glory a couple of years ago. At the news of Anthony Mann's firing, many in the motion picture profession have expressed their misgivings. Mann is one of the most respected of American directors, known principally for his Westerns with James Stewart (Winchester '73, 1950; The Naked Spur, 1953; The Far Country, 1954; The Man from Laramie and Strategic Air Command, both 1955). Others have expressed their doubts as to whether Kubrick, who up until now has only made films on a limited budget, will be able to handle a $12 million project like Spartacus, a huge star-studded epic set during the Roman Empire.
- Los Angeles, 20 February: Singer Eddie Fisher has filed for divorce from his wife, actress Debbie Reynolds. Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor have apparently been inseparable since the star went to watch Fisher, the best friend of her late husband Mike Todd, perform at the Tropicana in Las Vegas.
- Paris, 11 March:
 Just as Claude Chabrol's second feature, Les Cousins has been released, the Jean Vigo prize jury has chosen to honor his first film, Le Beau Serge (Bitter Reunion). But that choice created certain rumblings from those in the profession who object to the young director's rapid rise. Chabrol's two films, the first set in the country, and the second in Paris, have the same excellent young actors in the leads, Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy.
- Rome, 16 March: The Swedish actress Anita Ekberg has arrived at Cinecittà to film La Dolce vita under the direction of Federico Fellini.
- Cairo, 18 March: Egyptian censors have decided to ban all of Elizabeth Taylor's films as a retaliatory measure against the actress' financial support for Israel.
 - New York, 18 March: The director George Stevens has brought all of his meticulous preparation and shooting method to bear on The Diary of Anne Frank. The result is a three-hour portrait of a Jewish family's survival in an Amsterdam attic during the wartime occupation by the Germans. It has been adapted from the Broadway production that drew heavily on the real diary kept by Anne Frank, a teenager whose family underwent the ordeal depicted in the film. It ended with their discovery in 1944, after which they were sent to the death camps. Stevens' solemnity smothers Anne's remarkable gaiety and love of life, and his choice of the inexperienced former cover girl Millie Perkins to play Anne was a gamble that has not paid off.
- Switzerland, 22 March:
 Alain Delon and Romy Schneider got to know each other in Vienna last summer during the making of Christine, which was directed by Pierre Gaspard-Huit. If Delon had first described Schneider as a "little white goose," he soon fell under her spell, and enjoyed the many retakes of their screen kisses. By the time the filming was completed, the couple had fallen deeply in love with each other. Scheider decided not to return to Cologne but to rejoin Delon in Paris, where they are now living together in his apartment on the quai Malaquai. Magda Schneider, Romy's actress mother, expressed her disapproval of her daughter's actions, but to no avail. Romy broke all contact with her family to prove her determination and Magda has finally given in. Delon and Schneider have announced their engagement, putting the affair on a legal basis.
- Hollywood, 29 March: Elizabeth Taylor, originally Protestant, has been officially converted to Judaism. The ceremony took place at a Hollywood synagogue.
 - Hollywood, 29 March: Billy Wilder's new film, Some Like It Hot, is a high-water mark in screen comedy. Wilder and his usual screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond have created an amalgam of parody, slapstick, romance and farce -- modern in its sexual approach, nostalgic in its tribute to screwball comedies and old gangster movies. The clever plot begins in the Chicago of the 1920s, where Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), two jazz musicians who are on the run from gangsters, disguise themselves as 'Josephine' and 'Daphne' in order to join an all-girl band on its way to Florida. They become friends with Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), the band's singer, with whom Joe falls in love. Wilder's speedy comic style gets equal performances from the three stars and a supporting cast that includes Joe E. Brown, George Raft and Pat O'Brien. Curtis and Lemmon give unparalleled drag portrayals: Tony in a dark wig, high-pitched voice and alluring made-up eyes; Jack in high-heeled shoes, a flapper's frock and a blonde wig. Marilyn, the genuine female article, brings sensitivity to her role, and sings two snappy numbers, "Runnin' Wild" and "I Wanna Be Loved by You," as well as "I'm Through with Love."
- Hollywood, 7 April:
 The record of Oscars® won by a single film, held by Gone With the Wind and only twice matched, has finally been beaten. By the end of the evening at the RKO Pantages Theater, Gigi had scored a grand total of nine Oscars®, sweeping all the categories for which it was nominated: Best Picture, Director (Vincente Minnelli), Screenplay (Alan Jay Lerner), Cinematography (Joseph Ruttenberg), Art Direction (William A. Horning, Henry Grace, Preston Ames, Keogh Gleason), Film Editing (Adrienne Fazan), Song ("Gigi", music by Frederick Loewe, lyric by Lerner), Musical Score (André Previn) and Costume Design (Cecil Beaton). Unusually, not one of the film's cast was honored in any category. Susan Hayward was honored as Best Actress for her all-stops-out performance as Barbara Graham, the petty criminal executed for murder in the harrowing I Want To Live!. The Best Actor statuette went to David Niven's subtle playing as a bogus major arrested for molesting women in the cinema in Separate Tables. Wendy Hiller gained a Best Supporting Actress Oscar® for her landlady in the same movie. The burly Burl Ives was delighted to be given the Best Supporting Actor award for his role as the obstinate patriarch in The Big Country.
- New York, 19 April:
 Having caused scandal and division among critics, audiences and churchmen in its native Italy as well as in Catholic Europe, Federico Fellini's La Dolce vita (The Sweet Life) has arrived in the U.S. This study of crippling boredom, leading to artistic paralysis and loose sexual morals, played out against the decadence of postwar Roman cafe society, is an undoubted cinematic masterpiece. Fellini's imagination has run riot with a series of striking, brilliantly photographed images as his central character (Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist, lives out 24 hours in search of a story. Memorable scenes include a huge statue of Christ flown over Rome, Anita Ekberg drenched in the Trevi Fountain with a kitten on her head and Nadia Gray hosting an orgy at which she performs a striptease. Here is a contrived world of shoddy pleasures in a film that amazes and enthralls.
 - Cannes, 16 May: Accompanied by their "mentor," Jean Cocteau, the hot-heads of the New Wave arrived in force for this year's Cannes Film Festival. In addition to Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, one also noticed the presence of Roger Vadim, Alain Resnais, and Marcel Camus, who could certainly be considered part of the New Wave. If Truffaut, Resnais and Camus came to speak up for their own films, others arrived to support them. It was Truffaut, the former harsh critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, who carried off the Best Director prize for his first feature Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows). He derived the screenplay from his own deprived childhood, and follows the adventures of a 12-year old Parisian boy, neglected by both his mother and stepfather, who plays truant and takes to petty crime. He is placed in a reform school, but escapes to the coast. The film ends with a freeze of the child's face as he runs to the sea and, perhaps, liberty. The film's freewheeling quality is refreshing, but it is the natural performance of the young Jean-Pierre Léaud that makes it outstanding. Unfortunately, Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour, original in concept and subject, was shown outside of competition. The Golden Palm was given to Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), Marcel Camus' musical transposition of the Greek myth to the Carnival in Rio.
- New York, 18 May:
 In Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks has abandoned the sweeping exteriors of the traditional Western for the claustrophobic interiors of a frontier town's bars, hotel and jail. John Wayne plays cantankerous, loner lawman John T. Chance who reluctantly gathers a "family" around him -- old-timer Walter Brennan, drunken deputy Dean Martin, professional gambler Angie Dickinson and beardless youth Ricky Nelson -- in order to bring murderer Claude Akins to trial. Hawks claims that Rio Bravo is his response to High Noon. "Gary Cooper ran around trying to get help and no one would give him any. And that's a rather silly thing for a man to do. So I said, we'll do just the opposite." And the result is a laconic "indoor" Western in which Dickinson is outstanding as Feathers, a warm and sexy woman moving easily in a man's world without ruffling any of its conventions.
 - London, 29 May: Tonight sees the gala premiere of the film version of John Osborne's landmark play Look Back in Anger. It stars Richard Burton as "Angry Young Man" Jimmy Porter, the brooding misogynist trapped in a dreary Midlands town and raging against the fossilized state of British society. Mary Ure plays his put-upon wife Allison, and Claire Bloom gives an icy edge to her friend Helena, the "unmarried Mother Superior" who temporarily takes over from Allison at the ironing board and in Jimmy's bed. Director Tony Richardson has opened up the play for the screen, and softened some of Jimmy's impotent rage, but the picture still packs a punch.
- Mexico City, 4 June:
 Luis Buñuel's latest film, Nazarin, tells of how a humble and unworldly priest attempts to live by the precepts of Christianity, but is despised for his pains, finding compassion only with a prostitute. Told in the manner of a Christian parable, the film is touching, as well as being an ironic and forceful criticism of formal religion.
- France, 18 June: Brigitte Bardot and actor Jacques Charrier have disclosed that they were married in secret of 5 June. The couple, who have been hounded by journalists since making Babette s'en va-t-en guerre (Babette Goes to War), left St. Tropez yesterday, hidden in two cars. The press was invited to the official ceremony at Bardot's parents' home today.
 - New York, 18 June: With the opening of The Nun's Story, director Fred Zinnemann's faith has borne fruit. His persistence and the securing of Audrey Hepburn for the role of Sister Luke convinced Jack L. Warner to make the film, based on the true story of former nun Marie-Louise Habets. Made in Rome, Belgium and the Congo jungle, the film, from its early sequences in the convent, through harrowing scenes in a madhouse, to the key Congo episodes rich in a sense of missionary selflessness, is majestic and moving. Its excellence is matched in every department, notably by Hepburn as the nun whose sense of individual self brings her into agonizing conflict with her vocation.
- New York, 6 July:
 Otto Preminger is code-breaking again in Anatomy of a Murder, a courtroom drama adapted from retired judge Robert Traver's novel and filmed in Traver's hometown in Michigan. James Stewart plays the easygoing country lawyer defending Ben Gazzara, accused of shooting the man who tried to rape his wife Lee Remick, and words such as "panties" and "contraception" are daringly bandied about. Presiding over the court is real-life Boston lawyer Joseph Welch, the man who helped expose Senator Joseph McCarthy.
- Rome, 30 July: Fire broke out today at Cinecittà destroying the sets used for director Carmine Gallone's film Carthage in Flames, and injuring 20 people.
- London, 5 August: Ray Austin, Cary Grant's former chauffeur, has failed in a suicide attempt. He is implicated in the divorce of the actor and his wife Besty Drake. Grant has accused his employee of having an affair with his wife.
- Moscow, 6 August: Soviet censors have banned director Christian-Jaque's Babette s'en va en guerre (Babette Goes to War), even though he is a member of the jury for the Moscow Film Festival.
 - Hollywood, 6 August: North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock's latest effort, is a blithely implausible chase thriller in which glibly feckless ad-man Cary Grant becomes the object of a cross-country spy hunt. It's packed with artful set pieces characteristic of Hitchcock, which include Grant being pursued across the prairie by a crop-duster and a climax on Mount Rushmore, which prompted Hitch to suggest the film be called "The Man Who Sneezed in Lincoln's Nose." Eva Marie Saint smolders sexily and there's a masterclass in silky villainy from James Mason.
- New York, 6 August: The French film En cas de malheur (Love Is My Profession), directed by Claude Autant-Lara, is to be shown here without any cuts. The American censor has passed all Brigitte Bardot's nude scenes intact.
- Rome, 8 August: Sophia Loren has just returned here with her husband Carlo Ponti, who could find himself charged with bigamy. Their marriage, which took place on 17 November 1957, is not considered valid because divorce is not recognized here. Under Italian law, Ponti is still married.
- Paris, 9 August: It has been reported that the French actress Jeanne Moreau intends to leave the cinema and devote herself to the stage.
- Brazil, 22 August: Following Italy's lead, Brazilian authorities have banned Louis Malle's Les Amants (The Lovers).
- London, 6 September: Actress Kay Kendall has died of leukemia. Her dearest wish, "to marry Rex Harrison," was realized in 1957 as soon as he was separated from his previous wife, Lilli Palmer.
- Paris, 9 September: The premiere of Roger Vadim's Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960 was canceled at the last moment. The 800 guests, among them Audrey Hepburn and her husband Mel Ferrer, left without having seen the film.
- Paris, 14 September:
 Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy," begun in the great Indian director's mind almost 10 years ago, has reached its climax with the release of The World of Apu. Taken at a less leisurely pace and more conventionally structured than either Pather Panchali or The Unvanquished, it is, nevertheless, imbued with the same keen observation, beautiful performances and memorable scenes, such as Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) scattering the pages of his novel over a mountain at dawn. Although Apu is inconsolable when he loses his wife in childbirth, this humanist triptych ends on a note of hope.
- Hollywood, 19 September: The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, seemed to appreciate the charms of capitalism on his visit to Los Angeles. Despite his recent criticism of American politics, he appeared relaxed and smiling at a dinner in his honor in Hollywood, during which several stars, including Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper, were presented to him.
- Zagreb, 12 October: Abel Gance is making Austerlitz, a joint Italo-Franco-Yugoslav production. The project has a provisional budget of 48 million francs, and prestigious international distribution deals are already in place.
 - Los Angeles, 14 October: Rock Hudson reveals a deft talent for comedy in Pillow Talk, in which he plays a philandering songwriter whose shared party phone line with career girl Doris Day leads to romantic complications. Directed by Michael Gordon, produced by Ross Hunter, and sleek as a brand-new Cadillac in Eastmancolor and CinemaScope, Pillow Talk features a superb supporting cast that includes Tony Randall as one of Day's disappointed suitors and Thelma Ritter as a tipsy maid. It's a departure for Day, too. As interior designer Jan Morrow, she swaps the suburban housewife look for haute couture.
- Vancouver, 14 October:
 Errol Flynn has died of a heart attack at the age of 50. A life devoted to dissipation has finally caught up with him. According to Jack L. Warner, the star had long been one of the living dead, ravaged by drink and drugs, bottle-nosed, bleary-eyed and wasted. Flynn's recent films have cast him as a drunk: a wastrel expatriate in The Sun Also Rises (1957); with tragic irony as his old drinking partner John Barrymore in Too Much Too Soon (1958); and then rambling woozily among African elephants in The Roots of Heaven (also 1958). There were still flickers of the old charm but the lights were about to go out. Flynn's final film was a semi-documentary, Cuban Rebel Girls (1959), featuring his last lover, the 16-year-old Beverly Aadland. The coroner who examined Flynn's body said that the most dashing and athletic of all screen Robin Hoods had the body of an old, sick and tired man.
- New York, 22 October: Errol Flynn has bequeathed the major part of his immense fortune ($50 million) to his estranged third wife, Patrice Wymore.
- Tokyo, 3 November: Premiere of Kon Ichikawa's Nido (Fires on the Plain), a violent description of the wanderings of Japanese soldiers trapped in the jungle who end up eating their dead comrades.
 - Hollywood, 18 November: Just as it was in 1925, the future of MGM is riding on a big-budget production of Ben-Hur. Director William Wyler, who also acted as producer after the death of Sam Zimbalist, worked as an assistant director on the chariot race in the original. This time around he has handed over the shooting of this thunderous sequence to Andrew Marton and ace stuntman Yakima Canutt. Charlton Heston's Judah Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd's Messala battle it out to the death in the Circus Maximus, re-created at the Cinecittà studios in Rome and the largest outdoor set ever built. Everything's big about this production, and with a budget of $14.5 million it's the most expensive movie ever made. It's also a supreme test of the stamina of Charlton Heston. Will its quality justify the cost?
- Hollywood, 25 November: Eleanor Powell and Glenn Ford, who married in 1943, have divorced. One of Hollywood's greatest screen dancers, Miss Powell gave up her career for marriage.
- Moscow, 18 December:
 After the worldwide success of Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying) two years ago, the Soviet cinema is offering audiences another film that promises to be equally welcome abroad. Entitled Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier) and directed by Grigori Chukrai, it tells of a young soldier, on four days leave from the Front during World War II, traveling by train, truck and on foot to see his mother. En route, he meets a variety of people affected in different ways by the war, and a girl with whom he falls in love. This simple, touching and unrhetorical view of everyday life in wartime Russia is directed with superb technical skill.
- New York, 21 December: Release in the U.S. of Marcel Camus' Orfeu Nego (Black Orpheus).
- Los Angeles, 22 December: Columbia Pictures releases Joseph L. Mankiewicz's screen version of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer, adapted to the screen by Williams himself and Gore Vidal. The film stars Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift and features Albert Dekker and Mercedes McCambridge.
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18 March - New York City,