- Copenhagen, 1 January: Release of Carl Theodor Dreyer's new film, Gertrud, with Nina Pens Rode and Bendt Rothe.
- Madrid, 4 January: The British director David Lean has just begun filming Doctor Zhivago, based on Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel.
 - Paris, 8 January:
 Agnès Varda's third film, Le Bonheur (Happiness), has been awarded the 22nd Louis Dulluc Prize. The plot is rather unusual: François, a young carpenter, lives happily with his wife Claire and their two children, Sandrine and Olivier. One day, François falls in love with Emilie, a pretty post-office employee. He conceals nothing from his wife, hoping she will accept the fact that he can be happily married and, at the same time, love his mistress. Then when Claire drowns herself, François lives happily ever after with Emilie and the children. The use of idyllic color landscapes, advertisement-style aesthetics and Mozart's music on the soundtrack create an ambiguity and ironc reflection on the film's title. The amorality of the ending has provoked controversy: Is it a feminist or anti-feminist statement? As if to answer, the posters proclaim: "Only a woman would have dared to make this film!" Another layer is added to the film by the fact that the man, the wife, and children are played by a real-life family, Jean-Claude, Claire, Sandrine and Olivier Drouot. Marie-France Boyer portrays the mistress.
- Hong Kong, 18 January: Philippe de Broca is on location for his new film Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (Chinese Adventures in China), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Ursula Andress and Jean Rochefort.
- Genoa, 27 January: During the congress of "The Third World and the World Community," Brazilian director Glauber Rocha presented his manifesto titled The Æsthetics of Hunger.
- Paris, 2 February: The Bulletin d'information du CNC has published an alarming report on movie attendance: 273 million spectators in 1964 as compared to 423 million in 1957.
- London, 15 February: Royal Command Performance of Lord Jim at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II, The Queen Mother and HRH the Princess Margaret. Peter O'Toole plays the title role in writer-director Richard Brooks' adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel, a mammoth production, wonderfully photographed by Freddie Young. Proceeds from the evening will go to the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund.
- Los Angeles, 23 February:
 Eight years after the death of Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel has succumbed to a heart attack in his Santa Monica home. Born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, England, on 16 June 1890, he settled in the States in 1912, after understudying Charles Chaplin during a Fred Karno tour of America. He changed his name to Stan Laurel and began a lengthy stint in vaudeville before breaking into films in 1917. That year he appeared in a two-reel short with Hardy, but it was not until 1927 that they began their comic partnership in Putting Pants on Philip.
- Paris, 26 February: La Vieille dame indigne (The Shameless Old Lady), the first feature directed by theater designer René Allio, gives the octogenarian actress Sylvie the role of her life. Based on a story by Bertholt Brecht, it tells of how a grandmother, who has lived a quiet life devoted to her large family, decides to change her habits on becoming a widow. She buys a car, joins a political group, and goes on vacation before dying happily.
- Cairo, 3 March: Henry Barakat, one of Egypt's most prolific filmmakers, has moved off the beaten track of musical comedy and melodrama with his latest film Al Haram (The Sin). Starring Faten Hamama, it is a cruel naturalist drama on the realities of rural life.
 - New York, 3 March: Julie Andrews' shining soprano rectitude soars above the saccharine sentimentality of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway musical The Sound of Music, directed by Robert Wise. Andrews is in her element as Maria, the postulant nun who leaves her Austrian abbey to care for the seven children of Christopher Plummer's irascible Baron von Trapp, stays with them through thick and thin and eventually becomes his wife. With her guidance the family is then transformed into a troupe of singers, and as such they elude the Nazis and escape to Switzerland. Based on a real-life story, and handsomely filmed on location in Salzburg and the Austrian Alps, The Sound of Music is more than two and a half hours of captivating corn. Plummer, himself a Shakespearean actor, seems glumly aware of this and his performance appears almost willfully wooden. This does nothing to prevent Andrews' dispensing her special brand of wholesomeness over the entire landscape from the moment she begins to belt out the title number and Ted McCord's Todd-AO camera pans across swathes of truly breathtaking scenery. Other musical highlights include "Edelweiss," sung by Andrews, the children and Plummer (his voice was dubbed by Bill Lee), the Andrews number "My Favorite Things," and Mother Abbess Peggy Wood singing "Climb Every Mountain."
- Lisbon, 15 March: Release of As Ilhas Encantados (The Enchanted Isles), by Carlos Vilardebo, with Amalia Rodrigues and Pierre Clementi.
- France, 30 March: In protest against duties and taxs, exhibitors have organized a countrywide "Free entry" operation to draw the public's attention to the problems faced by the industry.
- Los Angeles, 5 April:
 This year's Academy Awards ceremony, hosted by Bob Hope at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, was a bittersweet occasion: bitter for Audrey Hepburn, sweet for Julie Andrews. Hepburn, exquisite in a white full-length gown with gloves to match, found herself presenting the Best Actor Oscar® to her My Fair Lady co-star Rex Harrison, and having to stand by and watch the original Eliza Doolittle, Andrews, who was passed over for the film in Hepburn's favor, receiving the Best Actress Oscar® for Mary Poppins. The pill was particularly bitter to swallow, since Hepburn had failed even to be among the 12 nominees for My Fair Lady, which went on to win eight Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (George Cukor) and Color Costume Design (Cecil Beaton). Non-Americans Peter Ustinov and Lila Kedrova took away the Best Supporting Oscars® to complete the "alien" sweep of the acting awards, the former for the heist comedy Topkapi, and the latter for her affecting performance in Zorba the Greek. Best Foreign Film was Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), a compendium of three stories from director Vittorio De Sica, past his best, and hardly a worthy contender.
 - Hollywood, 10 April: Linda Darnell has met a terrible end while staying with friends. She was burned to death when a cigarette she had been smoking set fire to the living room where she was sleeping. Apparently she had been watching one of her old movies before the fire broke out. Darnell was a dark-eyed, sultry siren at Fox during the 1940s, where she did her best work with Otto Preminger and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, but her career wound down rapidly in the Fifties. She had recently hit the comeback trail with an A. C. Lyles Western, Black Spur, which awaits release.
- New York, 24 April:
 Rod Steiger, whose career has been languishing of late, has delivered a clammily impressive performance in The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet, with whom Steiger worked in television a decade ago. Steiger takes the title role, playing Sol Nazerman, a Jew living in Harlem who inhabits a private world haunted by memories of the Nazi death camps of World War II. Adapted from Edward Lewis Wallant's novel by David Friedkin and Morton Fine, the film was shot on location in New York, lending authenticity to a harrowing portrait (further embellished with a fine score by Quincy Jones).
 - Cannes, 12 May: Great Britain reigned at this year's Cannes Film Festival, taking the Grand Prix for Richard Lester's The Knack... And How to Get It, and capturing the best actor and actress awards for the co-stars of William Wyler's film The Collector, Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. The Knack, a tale of four young people sharing lodgings in London, has a youthful jauntiness, and fresh performances from a relatively unknown cast (Rita Tushingham, Ray Brooks, Michael Crawford and Donal Donnelly). In contrast, Special Jury Prize winner Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan is an eerie compendium of four ghost stories, its imagery, derived from Japanese paintings, beautifully composed on the wide screen.
- Cannes, 25 May:
 The Czechoslovakian director Jan Kadar's Obchod na korzu (The Shop on Main Street) has been shown at Cannes, giving an opportunity to see a revelatory, indeed miraculous performance by the elderly actress, Ida Kaminska, and leaving not a dry eye in the house. Set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, the film tells the story of an old Jewish lady who owns a button shop with barely a button in it, is stone deaf, and seems not to know that there is a war going on. A lowly carpenter (Jozef Kroner) is made "Aryan controller" of the shop, and he becomes caught between self-interest and growing affection for the innocent and bemused object of his surveillance. Kadar captures the political climate with absolute clarity, but it is the personal relationship, and the tragedy that comes about, that stays in the memory.
 - London, 10 June: Roman Polanski's Repulsion is an inside-out Psycho in which a cool Belgian blonde (Catherine Deneuve) surrenders to schizophrenia in an apartment in London's South Kensington. Her sexual fears drive her to kill her boyfriend John Fraser and slash lecherous landlord Patrick Wymark to death with a razor. We follow the descent into madness through her eyes, from the minutely observed obsession with cracks in the pavement to the terrifying hallucinations that crowd in on her. The film's sense of oppressive decay is symbolized by the image of a fetus-like skinned rabbit stuffed into Deneuve's handbag.
- Los Angeles, 22 June: Producer David O. Selznick has died of a heart attack (his fifth) at the age of 63. His widow is actress Jennifer Jones.
- Hollywood, 13 July: Columbia has announced that Jerry Lewis is to shoot Three on a Couch, his first film for the studio after completing 33 films for Paramount.
- New York, 3 August:
 As the titles roll in John Schlesinger's Darling, Julie Christie's gigantic face is slapped over the images of starving children on a London advertisement billboard. She's a model, drifting opportunistically through the shallows of chic London society, her image defined by the men she is with, all of them "image makers:" Dirk Bogarde's liberal television pubdit, Laurence Harvey's sleekly glib marketing mogul and Roland Curram's homosexual photographer with whom Christie competes for the same lover on a Capri holiday. Frederic Raphael's ascerbic screenplay reserves an ironic fate for the blithely self-absorbed "Darling" -- an empty marriage to an Italian aristocrat in which she is condemned to an endless round of hollow good works. This British production is a bleak comment on the so-called "Swinging Sixties."
 - Hollywood, 13 August: Today is not only Alfred Hitchcock's 66th birthday, but is also the day that he and the French director François Truffaut have agreed to meet in order to embark on a unique book project: to discuss and dissect the films and career of the "master of suspense," from his beginnings during the silent era of the 1920s up to the present day. Truffaut has already arrived in Hollywood with his friend and assistant Helen Scott, who will serve as interpreter. They hope to spend about 50 hours interviewing Hitchcock in his office at Universal Studios. First attracted to Hitchcock's films during his years as a critic on Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut hopes that this book will help to establish Hitch as one of the great figures of the world's cinema, and feels that, up to now, his achievements have been grossly underrated.
- London, 18 August: Catherine Deneuve and the English photographer David Bailey were married today. Despite being the mother of Roger Vadim's son Christian, it is Deneuve's first marriage. Vadim has recently married actress Jane Fonda.
- Paris, 1 October:
 Jean-Luc Godard's new film, Pierrot-le-fou, shares some common ground with his first feature, À bout de souffle (Breathless). There is a clear similarity between the two heroes, both played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Both are on the run, both are unable to assimilate into society, and each is betrayed by the woman he loves. Belmondo fits the role so well that it is surprising to learn that Godard originally had Michel Piccoli in mind, then tried to get Richard Burton. Nor did he originally cast his wife Anna Karina as co-star, but Sylvie Vartan, the singer, who refused the offer. The film is a stunning study of personal and global violence (there are references to Vietnam) that uses color in a dramatic and symbolic manner. Asked why there was so much blood in the film, Godard replied, "It is not blood but red." But mainly it is a tragedy about the transience of love. At the end, abandoned by Karina, Belmondo paints his face blue, places sticks of dynamite around his head and lights the fuse. He has second thoughts, but it is too late. "Damn, it's too absurd!" he says, before blowing up.
- Los Angeles, 26 October: George Stevens has started proceedings against Paramount and the NBC television network to prevent the mutilation of A Place in the Sun, which the network is scheduled to screen on 12 March 1966. He is demanding $1 million in damages if cuts are made to the film.
- Rome, 30 October: Federico Fellini has just completed Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), starring Giulietta Masina.
- London, 31 October: Charles Chaplin called a press conference to announce his plans to make a new film, A Countess from Hong Kong. Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren will co-star.
- Paris, 1 November: The editorial staff of Cahier du Cinéma has come up with some new policy decisions: firstly to distance itself from writers' political views, secondly to refuse to systematically promote American films. The film critics' new methods are to be based on structuralism and linguistics.
- Paris, 10 November: Brigitte Bardot has claimed a symbolic one-franc payment of costs and damages from several publications that published photos, taken with a telescopic lens, of La Madrague, her property near St. Tropez, and its occupants.
- Prague, 12 November: Release of Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky (Loves of a Blonde), director Milos Forman's second film.
- Los Angeles, 15 November: Walt Disney and his brother Roy have announced their plans for a second Disneyland in Florida. Walt Disney World, which is planned to open in October 1971, will cover an area twice the size of Manhattan. The land alone cost $5 million.
- Paris, 17 November: On leaving a club in rue Princesse, the actor Peter O'Toole hit the Comte Philippe de La Fayette over the head. The latter has decided to lodge a complaint.
- Paris, 22 November: Roger Vadim has started shooting La Curée (The Game Is Over), based on the novel by Emile Zola. The film will star American actress Jane Fonda (daughter of Henry), who has agreed to appear nude on the screen for the first time. She happens to be the director's wife.
- Paris, 22 November:
 Louis Malle has not prepared us for his new film Viva Maria!, which comes as surprise in many respects. First, it is rare for a French director to attempt a Western-type picture. Shot in Eastmancolor and Panavision on location in Mexico, the movie has attempted to emulate the visual quality of the Hollywood movies, at the same time wittily sending up the kind of superproduction it is. In addition, the stars are the explosive duo of Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau as the Two Marias, a song-'n'-dance act in an unspecified Central American state. They both fall for a revolutionary leader (George Hamilton) whom they help in the struffle to overthrow the country's dictator. The gaiety of this large-scale extravaganza is in complete contrast to Malles' last film, the downbeat Le Feu follet (The Fire Within). France's two top female stars seem to relish the zestful occasion, though some critics have deplored Malle's foray into commercial cinema.
- New York, 30 November: Otto Preminger is appearing in the State Supreme Court where he has brought charges against Columbia's television subsidiary, Screen Gems, for having granted transmission rights for his highly acclaimed film, Anatomy of a Murder, to a Chicago station that is planning 36 commercial breaks during screening.
- New York, 30 November: The Legion of Decency has been rechristened the National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures.
- New York, 13 December: Brigitte Bardot's arrival at Kennedy Airport today caused great excitement and jostling among the crowd of reporters and fans assembled to greet her.
 - New York, 22 December: Omar Sharif, who shot to international stardom in David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia, has been cast in the title role of the same director's Doctor Zhivago, exchanging Arabian sand for Finnish snow. He is the idealistic doctor hero swept along by the epic events of the Russian Revolution in Robert Bolt's adaptation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel. Lean has explained that the Revolution provides "the canvas against which we tell a moving and highly personal love story." The lovers are Sharif's Zhivago and Julie Christie's beautiful Lara, for whom a brief happiness is tragically engulfed by the tide of history. Co-stars are Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Tom Courtenay, Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson, an immensely strong cast but one that fails to give the picture a specifically Russian flavor. Director Lean has approached the project with his customary deliberation and meticulous preparation. Shooting took nine months, in Finland and in Spain, where a huge exterior set representing 1917 Moscow was erected. In his youth, Lean was an accountant, and something of the tidy precision of the bookkeeper has crept into the international movie packages over which he presides. It's as if the laborious preparation and then the process of editing, which Lean, a former editor, has described as "a kind of magic," mask a directing talent that has atrophied under the weight of craftsmanlike production values. Has Lean ceased to be a director and become a technician?
- New York, 22 December: The Screen Writers Guild signed a new retrospective agreement today with Universal Pictures for films made during the period 1948-1960. From now on, script writers are to receive 1.5 percent of the studio's revenue from television screening rights for their credited films.
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6 May - Louisville, KY,