- Avoriaz, 23 January:
 Some critics consider director Brian De Palma the natural successor to Alfred Hitchcock. It's true that De Palma has done little to discourage the comparison and has peppered his work with nods toward the master of suspense. At the Festival of Fantastic Film at the French winter resort of Avoriaz, his lates film Carrie, adapted from a Stephen King novel, has caused such a sensation that the jury has unhesitatingly awarded him the Grand Prix. Once again De Palma has demonstrated his technical virtuosity and ability to manipulate the audience. Sissy Spacek stars as the high school ugly duckling who unleashes terrible telekinetic powers against those who have drenched her with pig's blood at the prom. The school is reduced to rubble, her religious zealot of a mother, Piper Laurie, impaled by a hail of flying implements. More shocks follow...
- Hollywood, 30 January: The acting debut awards at last night's Golden Globes ceremony in Beverly Hills went to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jessica Lange for their respective performances in Stay Hungry and King Kong. Harry Belafonte hosted the leve telecast for Metromedia.
 - Paris, 9 February: "Rather than a film about death, Providence is more a film about the desire not to die," remarked Alain Resnais on his latest work. Providence is basically a multi-layered nightmare dreamed by a dying novelist (John Gielgud, in one of his most audacious and testing screen roles) inhabited by four members of his family. The next morning everything is bathed in light as they all come together joyously to celebrate his birthday. The thin dividing line between fact and fiction, dream and reality, has hardly ever been better conceived. During his fight against the dying of the light, Gielgud is able to crystallize the psychological traits of his two sons and their women. The Anglo-American cast includes Ellen Burstyn, Elaine Stritch, David Warner and Dirk Bogarde, the latter with whom Resnais had wanted to work since 1966. The British playwright David Mercer provided the complex and fascinating screenplay.
- Paris, 19 February:
 Neglected by award-givers for some years now, Joseph Losey was delighted to receive the two top Césars for his dark drama of the Occupation, Mr. Klein. It was considered the best film, and Losey the best director. Alain Delon, excellent in the title role, plays Robert Klein, a womanizing antique dealer, untouched by the German occupation and indifferent to the fate of the Jews under the Nazis -- until he is confused with another Robert Klein, a wanted man and a Jew. This complex and absorbing examination of identity is a blend of Kafkaesque nightmare and pacey thriller. Annie Girardot was voted best actress for Dr. Françoise Gailland, and the best actor was Michel Galabru for Le Juge et l'assassin (The Judge and the Assassin), Bertrand Tavernier's new period piece. All the films honored were noticeably different.
 - Paris, 23 February: As with Satyricon, Federico Fellini has once again gone into the past to find analogies for the decadence that he perceives in present-day Italy. This time, the director has adapted episodes from the life of the 18th-century author, scientist and libertine, Giacomo Casanova. In order to symbolize the lovelessness of Casanova's erotic encounters, Fellini shows the hero, who has fornicated mechanically with one girl after another, finally having sex with an actual automaton. After the warmth of Fellini's previous autobiographical films, such as Roma and Amarcord, this is a chilling study of a sexual obsessive. The background is an artificial Venice, the sumptuous sets for which were created at Cinecittà by Danilo Donati. Behind extraordinary makeup, Donald Sutherland is very impressive in the title role. Despite the coldness of the character, Sutherland manages to lend Casanova a certain poignancy as the aging man at the end.
- Warsaw, 25 February:
 The Stalinist period still remains taboo in many East European countries, especially in Poland, so one has to admire the courage of Andrzej Wajda for making Czlowiek z Marmaru (Man of Marble). However, the film's release was held up for four years. This bold, no-hold-barred political tale is Wajda's reflection on Poland's present through its immediate past. This is achieved by following a Krakow film student (Krystyna Janda) as she investigates the life of a bricklayer hero of the 1950s, Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), as a basis for her undergraduate project. But she finds obstacles in getting at the truth about the worker who stepped out of line. Most effective are the black-and-white reconstructions of the newsreels of the time which she uses in her research. A portrait of Birkut emerges: he believed in the workers' revolution, in building housing for all, and his very virtues were his undoing. Her hard-driving style and the content of the film unnerve her supervisor, who kills the project with the excuse she's over budget.
 - Paris, 9 March: After a nine-year absence from fiction films, Agnès Varda has made a triumphant return with L'Une chante, l'autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn't), an irrefutably feminist movie, which the director claims is about "the happiness of being a woman." Taking Simone du Beauvoir's maxim that "Women are made, not born" as her theme, Varda examines the lives of two friends (Valérie Maltresse and Thérèse Liotard) of different temperaments and backgrounds who both face adversity but finally achieve independence and fulfillment, over a number of years. One becomes a singer, travels the world and has children, the other runs a family planning clinic.
- Paris, 16 March: Release of the film made by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1964 titled Comizi d'amore. Microphone in hand, Pasolini's interviewer asks Italians to talk about sex: he asks children where babies come from, young and old women if they are men's equals, men and women if a woman's virginity matters, how they view homosexuals, how sex and honor connect, if divorce should be legal, and if they support closing the brothels (the Merlina Act). He periodically checks in with Alberto Moravia and Cesare Musatti. Lello Bersani is intrusive and judgemental in his interviews, prodding those who answer. The film's thesis: despite the booming post-war economy, Italians' attitudes toward sex are either rigidly Medieval (the poor and the South) or muddled and self-censoring (the bourgeoisie and the North). -- jhailey@hotmail.com, IMDb
 - Los Angeles, 24 March: An evil curse seems to have hung over Roman Polanski since the Polish director settled in the United States. Thus, after the gruesome and tragic death of his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, murdered in 1969 by the demonic disciples of Charles Manson, Polanski is at the center of another sordid affair, this time with himself as the unfortunate protagonist. He was arrested two weeks ago in Beverly Hills on the complaint of a mother who accused him of having sex with her 13-year-old daughter. He will appear before a grand jury for the corruption of a minor, an extremely serious offense in America, where puritanism can express itself with vehemence. There is good reason, therefore, for the director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown to be worried about the outcome of this case, which could have grave consequences for his future as a film director and his continued residence in the States.
- Los Angeles, 29 March:
 This year the Academy Awards ceremony was staged by William Friedkin and the Oscars® presented by Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Warren Beatty and Richard Pryor. The biggest sensation has been caused by Sylvester Stallone, who was a complete unknown until a few months ago. Now Rocky, the project that he wrote and starrred in, has won two major Oscars®, Best Picture and the Best Director statuette for John G. Avildsen. Stallone hardly looks like a movie star, there is something of a caricature Victor Mature about him, and he's about as articulate as his mumbling two-fisted hero Rocky Balboa. But Rocky's phenomenal success has shown that the American Dream never dies. Peter Finch won a tragic posthumous Best Actor Oscar® for his performance as the prophet of the airwaves who was "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore!" in Network. He died of a hert attack during the picture's publicity campaign, and his wife accepted the Oscar® on his behalf. His co-star in Network, Faye Dunaway, was voted Best Actress for her portrayal of a ruthless TV executive. Beatrice Straight won an unexpected Best Supporting Actress Oscar® for her brief appearance as the neglected wife of William Holden in the same movie, and playwright Paddy Chayefsky was honored for Network's screenplay. The Best Supporting Actor award went to Jason Robards for his neatly judged performance as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men.
- Madrid, 9 April: Sixteen years after it was made, Luis Buñuel's Viridiana, with Silvia Pinal and Francisco Rabal, has been released in Spain.
 - New York, 20 April: With his latest film, Annie Hall, Woody Allen has hit his stride. In this semi-autobiographical "nervous romance," he plays Alvy Singer, a stand-up comic with a style not a million miles away from that of the younger Allen. His partner Diane Keaton, appearing with him for the third time, is the wacky, Waspish gamine of the title, gawkily dressed in an outfit of vest, baggy trousers and oversize hat which looks likely to start a fashion trend. They meet over a game of tennis and fall in and out of love as Allen muses over the other main character in the movie, New York City, gingerly dips his toe into the warm waters of life in California, shmoozes with Paul Simon and, gloriously, summons up Marshall McLuhan to silence a fatuous bore in line at an art-house movie theater. "Boy, if life were only like this!" laments Alvy. In Annie Hall, Allen celebrates his love affair with New York and with Keaton (whose real name is Hall), and the middle-class Manhattan-Jewish background which informs his comedy, the basis of which is the wry one-liner. Critics have compared the film to Fellini's 8½, but Allen's characteristically self-deprecating response is, "It's more like my 2½."
- Paris, 25 April: René Féret's La Communion solennelle, a humorous chronicle of a family, is the first film to be awarded a prize by the Philip Morris Foundation.
- Prague, 2 May: Release of Osvobození Prahy (The Liberation of Prague), the third film in director Otakar Vávra's trilogy depicting the state of the country after the Munich agreements of 1938.
- Prague, 10 May: Anne Gaillard and Jean-Edern Hallier, journalists from France Inter, said they "seriously doubted whether Simone Signoret actually wrote her own autobiography La Nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était (Nostalgia Is Not What It Used To Be)" (Seuil). The actress has decided to sue the journalists.
- Paris, 17 May:
 Claude Goretta, who has directed films in his native Switzerland, has brought his talents to bear on a new French picture, La Dentellière (The Lacemaker). Its main revelation is Isabelle Huppert as the guileless heroine, although she has already appeared in 14 films. Despite the passivity of the role of a reticent Parisian hairdresser, Hupper retains our sympathy throughout. This touching, well-observed tale tells how the girl meets and falls in love with a university student (Yves Beneyton) while on a vacation in Normandy. Back in Paris, the gap in class and education causes a painful rift, and the girl's breakdown.
 - New York, 19 May: Smokey and the Bandit casts Burt Reynolds as the Bandit, an ace trucker running a 900-mile gauntlet pursued by Jackie Gleason's crackpot redneck Sheriff Burford T. Justice, aka "Smokey." Making his debut as a director is former stuntman Hal Needham, so the action is fast and furious as the laid-back Reynolds outpaces Gleason in an action-packed movie that is about as subtle as an outing with the Three Stooges but manages to retain a madcap charm amid the mayhem of hurtling automobiles. Sally Field supplies the romantic interest. Reynolds has been looking for a hit to break a disappointing run of movies: WW and the Dixie Dancekings, Lucky Lady and Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love. Reynolds almost succeeded in extricating himself from the latter clinker with some engagingly amateurish hoofing, but then went down with all hands last year in Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon. After establishing his credentials as a director with last year's Gator, it seems that, at long last, Reynolds has a smash on his hands.
- New York, 25 May:
 Both Universal and United Artists turned down the chance to produce Star Wars, directed by 33-year-old George Lucas. Twentieth Century-Fox finally accepted, giving Lucas complete control during the four years of preparation and a relatively modest budget of $11 million, of which half went toward the sets and special effects. Shot in Guatemala, Tunisia and Death Valley, with interiors at Elstree Studios in England, the film is so spectacular that it looks as if it cost three times as much. Obviously influenced by the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, as well as tales of knights of old, it tells of how Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), given a sword by his mentor Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness), and assisted by space pilot Han Solo (Harrison Ford), rescues Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) from the evil clutches Darth Vader. Two robots, C-3PO and R2D2, provide comic relief. Star Wars has turned out to be one of the most exciting, amusing and inspiring science fiction movies ever made. And the long lines at box offices around the country attest to the audience's approval of Lucas' vision.
- New York, 31 May: Rita Hayworth has been made a ward of her daughter, Yasmin, while being treated for alcoholism.
 - Rome, 3 June: Ettore Scola has drawn on his own memories for his new film, Una Giornata particolare (A Special Day). He was six-and-a-half years old on 8 May 1938, when Adolf Hitler arrived in Rome to meet Benito Mussolini. He recalls the fascist propaganda, "the apotheosis of rhetoric." The buildings were empty as everyone rushed into the streets to acclaim Il Duce and the Führer. This is the background for Una Giornata particolare, most of the action of which takes place in an apartment between two lonely people. They are a weary mother of six children and a homosexual radio announcer. They are drawn together while the populace, including the woman's brutish fascist husband, are out cheering their heroes. Repression, social and political, is the common bond between these two very different characters. What makes this encounter enthralling is the casting against type of the normally glamorous Sophia Loren as a frumpish housewife, and the "ladies man" Marcello Mastroianni as the homosexual. The fact that Mastroianni temporarily abandons his homosexuality to make love to Loren, though contrived, reveals the strength of their need for love and companionship. The film ends on a downbeat note when Loren's husband returns home, invigorated by the macho image of Mussolini, and forces himself upon her.
- San Francisco, 7 June: Francis Ford Coppola mortgaged all of his personal assets (including his house) as a guarantee for the $10 million loan made to him by United Artists to complete his Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now.
- Hollywood, 20 June: Warner Bros. has modified the ending of John Boorman's The Exorcist II: The Heretic, following negative reactions from audiences. Instructions were telephoned in by the director from Ireland.
- New York, 21 June: A new policy limiting the size, format and content contained in advertisements of pornographic films in the New York Times will take effect on 1 July. The guidelines are as follows: only single-column displays up to one inch in length; content will be limited to the name of the film, the name and address of the theater, the showing times and the label "adults only;" no illustrations or other information; no offensive theater names or film titles; no more than one advertisement from any one theater in each issue.
- Tokyo, 16 August: Director Nagisa Oshima has been charged with violating the law for publishing a book containing extracts, which have been judged to be licentious, from his film Ai no corrida (In the Realm of the Senses).
- Memphis, 16 August:
 Elvis Presley has died of a heart attack at his Graceland mansion, where he was living with daughter Lisa-Marie. Since April the 42-year-old star had been having serious health problems caused by repeated shots of Demerol and morphine. At 2 p.m., his companion Ginger Alden found him unconcious on the bathroom floor. He died en route to the hospital. Tennessee-born, and nicknamed "Elvis the Pelvis" and later "The King," he made 33 movies, and changed the history of popular music. Although his dependency on drugs and his passion for junk food were well known, his millions of fans are in a state of shock. To them, though, he will never die.
 - Paris, 17 August: Luis Buñuel's most recent film, Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire), is a very free adaptation of the Pierre Louys novel, The Woman and the Puppet, already the basis for the Sternberg-Dietrich 1935 movie, The Devil Is a Woman. When Maria Schneider left the project after only three weeks, Buñuel, with the surreal logic that runs through his work, decided to cast two actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina) to alternate the role of Conchita, the maid who bewitches her master. Fernando Rey, that embodiment of Buñuel's libido, delivers his most sinister, witty and sly performance as the worldly businessman, whose hopes are fed by Conchita who refuses to give herself to him. At first the dual casting is disconcerting, but it gradually becomes strangely normal -- revealing two different sides of the same woman which the man fails to notice. In the background to the activities of Rey, that discreetly charming bourgeois, are those of a revolutionary group, attempting to undermine his life style. Cet obscur objet is another brilliant Buñuel bomb placed under the privileged classes, revelaing that the 77-year-old Spanish master has lost little of his anarchic sense of humor over the years, since his first film, Un chien andalou, almost half a century ago.
- Los Angeles, 16 September: David Begelman, the vice-president of Columbia Pictures Industries, has denied forging actor Cliff Robertson's signature in order to cash a check made out to Robertson by the studio accountant. The New York head office of Columbia is gravely concerned about the matter.
- Los Angeles, 19 September: In the ongoing scandal surrounding Roman Polanski, a grand jury has handed down a six-count indictment, remanding him to 90 days in prison with a psychiatric evaluation. The jury has determined that there is sufficient evidence supporting the allegations brought against him for corrupting a minor. The mother of a 13-year-old girl has accused the director of assaulting her daughter during a photo shoot for a French magazine. If the psychiatric evaluation indicates that Polanski suffers from a disorder, that may alleviate his sentence, the maximum of which is 50 years in prison.
- Paris, 22 September: Director Claude Autant-Lara, who was interviewed for the release of his new film Gloria, has analyzed the drop in movie attendance. According to him, it's Jean-Luc Godard and his New Wave friends who have emptied the theaters.
- Cannes, 1 October: The Festival Board of Directors have named Gilles Jacob as their new general representative.
- Washington, DC, 22 October: Postal officials have ordered the removal of posters depicting Al Jolson made up in blackface from 5,000 major post offices. The idea had been to use scenes from The Jazz Singer (1927) to promote a commemorative issue that would honor the 50th anniversary of talking pictures, but after receiving complaints that the poster was insulting to black people it was withdrawn. Officials were, however, quick to point out that the stamp does not reflect the actual Jolson image.
- New York, 19 October:
 To demonstrate that she is not just a charmingly kooky one-note personality, Diane Keaton has followed Annie Hall with a challenging role in Richard Brooks' Looking for Mr. Goodbar, adapted from Judith Rosner's best-selling novel. Keaton plays a teacher of deaf children who cruises singles bars at night for high-risk sexual adventures which lead her to a violent encounter with a bisexual psychopath convincingly played by Tom Berenger. Also making an impact is Richard Gere in the role of Tony Lopanto, chilling as the self-styled "greatest fuck of your whole life," from whose sadistic treatment Keaton derives a perverse pleasure. Writer and director Brooks says of Keaton, "I wondered if Diane could handle the dark side of the character as well as the teacher side, but she's sensational."
- Cairo, 5 November: Misr Studios held a huge celebration to mark the 50th anniversay of the Egyptian cinema.
- Paris, 9 November: Release of La Crabe-Tambour, directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer from his own book, with Jacques Perrin and Jean Rochefort.
- Madrid, 11 November: A Royal decree has abolished film censorship and authorized the free importation of films.
 - New York, 16 November: In Star Wars, George Lucas aimed at re-creating the non-stop action of the classic serials of the 1930s. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg digs back farther and deeper, seeking to release in the audience the sense of wonder experienced by those who saw the miracle of motion pictures for the first time. Close Encounters invokes the closing words of Howard Hawks' science fiction classic The Thing from Another Planet -- "Watch the skies" -- but with none of the hysteria of the 1950s. The impulse behind the picture is, perhaps, religious, a yearning to establish contact with a race of benevolent aliens rather than turn our guns on them. For the movie's central character Richard Dreyfuss, the journey to Devil's Tower, Wyoming, where an alien ship will land, is a pilgrimage. Like a latter-day saint his own close encounter bathes him in the glow of the vision he has nourished along the way. The military men who ring the landing site make no attempt to remove him when he joins the throng who watch with upturned faces as the Mother Ship descends. If Dreyfuss is Everyman, then the Gallic charm of François Truffaut, cast as a UFO expert, is used by Spielberg as a neat shorthand for liberal humanism. Truffaut's character is based on Jacques Vallée, a real-life UFO-logist and one-time collaborator with Allen Hynek, whose The UFO Experiences provided the inspiration for the film. Hynek appears as a pipe-puffing observer in the climactic encounter with the aliens. With this material, Spielberg has wrought his own kind of magic, demonstrating that miracles -- like the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, glimpsed on the television in Dreyfuss' living room -- can come true.
- Washington, DC, 18 November: The American Film Institute last night named Gone With the Wind America's greatest movie. The decision was reached by a vote involving the 350,000 members of the AFI from all 50 states and 50 foreign countries. The result was announced before an audience of 2,200 directors, producers, writers, studio executives, film stars and politicians including President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter. Other films voted into the select Top Ten of America's best were Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Wizard of Oz, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The African Queen, Citizen Kane and The Grapes of Wrath.
- Los Angeles, 20 November: The Los Angeles Times has published an article in praise of Steven Spielberg's UFO fantasy Close Encounters of the Third Kind, adapted from the novel by Ray Bradbury, the famous science fiction writer. "It is without a doubt the most important film of our era... A religious experience with a universal message full of hope."
- Munich, 25 November:
 A West German film about the Nazi concentration camps is a rare event, and Theodor Kotulla's Aus einem deutschen Leben (Death Is My Trade) makes a powerful impression. It is based on the life of the notorious Rudolph Höss (not to be confused with Hess) from 1922 until 1946. For some reason named "Fritz Lang" in the film, he is seen as a German working-class patriot who joins the Nazi Party in 1924 and distinguishes himself by dedicated hard work and application. Himmler appoints him to an important post at Dachau and, seven years later, he is commandant at Auschwitz, made responsible for carrying out the Final Solution. After the war is over, he writes his memoirs and dies without exhibiting a hint of remorse. He is portrayed by Götz George as a rather ordinary man, committed to his duty. A detached account of events in a semi-documentary style, Aus einem deutschen Leben is all the more chilling for its lack of emotion and the seeming normality of its protagonists. Of the German high command's skill in securing unquestioning faith in its ideology, the 145-minute film offers neither comment nor apology. We look forward to more German films on the subject.
 - New York, 15 December: Male dancing on screen has been given the kiss of life by the discovery of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, a movie that should be shown in seatless cinemas, giving the kids space to dance to it. The discotheque, with its strobe-lighting and tinsel atmosphere, is the 70s equivalent of those sumptuous nightclubs of 30s musicals, sonic and scenic escapes from the drab reality outside. Travolta plays a paint store clerk in Brooklyn, a weekday nobody, who is transformed on Saturday nights into a stunning stud in the disco where he is king. On a floor lit from below, to music by the Bee Gees, he dances dynamically in ensembles, pairs and solo. The story, originally derived from an article by Nik Cohn entitled "Tribal Rites of the New York Saturday Night," pales beside the numbers. These include "Night Fever," "Stayin' Alive," "How Deep Is Your Love?" and "Jive Talkin'." The picture, directed by John Badham, was shot in the predominantly Italian neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Queens, and in Manhattan.
- Johannesburg, 26 December: Director Gibson Kente's musical film, How Long, has been banned and Kente and some of his film crew have been arrested. This film is the first South African effort to be entirely produced and directed by black South Africans.
- Corsier-sur-Vevey, 27 December:
 Two days ago Charles Chaplin died in his sleep at the age of 88. His funeral was held today at 11 a.m. in the intimate surroundings of the Anglican church in Vevey. A gentle rain was falling as the coffin, covered with a black and silver pall, was lowered into the grave. Chaplin's long journey is over.
- Tokyo, 29 December: Release of Wani to oum to ottosei, directed by Shigeyuki Yumane and starring Hiromi Gô.
- Toronto, 30 December: Chris Ward releases two compilation documentaries on two of rock's legendary bands: the 140-minute The Beatles and Beyond, and the 85-minute The Best of the Rolling Stones.
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13 January - Paris, France, 
13 September - Nether Wallop, Hampshire, England,