- Cannes, 7 January: The new director of the Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob, has announced that the event will run for only eleven days this year. Hoteliers and shopkeepers are protesting.
- Paris, 14 January:
 The Louis Delluc Prize has been awarded to Diabolo menthe (Peppermint Soda), the first feature by Diane Kurys, a former actress with the Madeleine Renaud/Jean-Louis Barrault theater company. Kurys (born in 1948) has drawn her screenplay from experiences of her own adolescence, with the action taking place in 1963, from the time of the Kennedy assassination. It revolves around Anne (Eléonore Klarwein) and Frédérique (Odile Michel), the teenage daughters of a divorced Jewish couple. They live with their mother, attend an authoritarian school, and spend their vacations with their father, with whom they are ill at ease. This gentle observant and nostalgic debut movie has attracted large audiences of young people since it opened in Paris a month ago.
- Paris, 26 January: The X-rating of Francis Giacobetti's Emmanuelle II has been removed by a special court decision.
- Peking, 30 January: Director Mu-jih Yuan has died. He was an important personality during the 1930s and one of the leaders of the Popular Liberation Army's revolutionary cinema.
- Prague, 1 February: Release of Hra o jablko (The Apple Game), by Vera Chytilova, made in 1976, with director Jirí Menzel in the lead role. It is Chytilova's first fiction film since 1969.
- London, 9 February: Roman Polanski, recently convicted of corruption of a minor in the United States, has announced his intention to remain outside the U.S. He left California the day before his sentence was pronounced.
- Calcutta, 12 February: Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray is bemused by the lack of interest in his latest film in his native India. Despite his popularity abroad, Ray has been unable to find a distributor in India for Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players). The distributors who had been planning to open the movie in Calcutta and several other major towns turned it down after a private showing. The film, starring Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey and featuring British actor Richard Attenborough, was well received by the public and film critics at the London Film Festival last month. It concerns two members of the court of the ruler of an Indian principality who, disregarding the pressure from the British and the collapse of the world around them, play game after game of chess.
- Los Angeles, 15 February:
 Coming Home is very much Jane Fonda's project. She commissioned Nancy Dowd to write a story about the impact of the Vietnam War on people at home which would be implicitly critical of U.S. policy. Fonda plays an army wife married to Marine Corps action man Bruce Dern. While he is serving his tour of duty in Vietnam, she takes a job in a veterans' hospital where she meets an old high school classmate, Jon Voight, who is now paralyzed from the waist down. This condition does not prevent him from pleasuring her, however, and they embark on an affair which has a liberating effect on Fonda. When Dern returns from Vietnam, traumatized by his experiences there, she has to choose between the two men. Director Hal Ashby handles the love affair between Fonda and Voight with discretion, but the film slowly slithers into tearjerker territory while whole chunks of dialogue are lost in the din of a pounding rock soundtrack. One of the most powerful scenes occurs when Voight speaks to a group of high school students about his feelings on the war, a scene which was largely improvised by the actor. Even though his attitude (and that of the film itself) is vehemently anti-war, he tells the students that they have to make up their own minds, they have a choice whether to go to war or not. For the moment the public have given this contemporary mixture of Since You Went Away (1944) and Brief Encounter (1946) a resounding thumbs down.
- Cairo, 26 February: The Egyptian Film Association has proclaimed Salah Abouseif's film al-Saqqa mat (The Water-Carrier Is Dead) the best film of 1977. The story concerns two men who have different views of the world: a water-carrier who still mourns the death of his wife twenty years before, and a funeral director who sees the fleeting passage of life and lives for the moment. Through their friendship, the water-carrier is encouraged to change his outlook and learns to enjoy life.
- Paris, 27 February: Actress Jean Seberg has published an open "Letter to drug addicts" in the daily paper, Libération.
- Los Angeles, 2 March: The president of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, has denied press reports that there was a huge government investigation into alleged corruption in the motion picture industry. The reports of a Hollywood inquiry followed the recent upheaval at the Columbia studios, whose president, David Begelman, resigned after admitting to embezzling studio funds.
- Lebanon, 15 March: The Palestinian filmmakers Ibrahim Mustapha Nasser and Abdel-Hafeth al Asmar have been killed while filming an Israeli military operation in the region.
- Los Angeles, 3 April:
 The 50th Academy Awards ceremony saw the odds-on favorite, George Lucas's innovative, effects-packed blockbuster Star Wars ousted by the intimist New York Jewish comedy angst of Woody Allen. Annie Hall had Allen named Best Director of the Best Picture, and winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar®, while his co-star Diane Keaton was voted Best Actress for her performance in the title role. However, Best Actor was Richard Dreyfuss for his gleefully manic performance in Neil Simon's The Goodbye Girl as an egocentric off-Broadway actor. At only 29, Dreyfuss is the youngest winner of this award. For the second year in a row, Jason Robards was Best Supporting Actor, taking the Oscar® this time for his performance as washed-up writer Dashiell Hammett in Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Lillian Hellman's Julia. The best thing in the film was Vanessa Redgrave in the title role, the mystery woman saving Jews from the Nazis. It won her a deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar® and a chance to harangue the audience about the plight of the Palestinians.
 - New York, 4 April: Twelve-year-old Brooke Shields, already a successful model, broke into films last year with Alice, Sweet Alice. Now, in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, she is Violet, the star attraction in a New Orleans brothel in 1917 during the last months of legal prostitution there. By any standards this is dangerous territory, but as Malle explains, "I'm always interested in exposing something, a theme, a character or a situation which seems to be unacceptable. Then I try to make it work." Malle has succeeded and avoided sensationalism. The little heroine brings a distinctly youthful and innocent view to the milieu, and the introduction of a photographer (Keith Carradine) -- who eventually marries Violet -- in the brothel carries the suggestion that there is art and beauty to be explored there. Susan Sarandon is beguiling as Violet's mother, who seems to unfold in the cameraman's presence. The film moves a little stiffly, a little slowly, possibly from a heavy emphasis on period art direction by Trevor Williams and Sven Nykvist's moody if gorgeous photography.
- New York, 6 April:
 David Begelman's departure from the presidency of the film and television division of Columbia Pictures is the culmination of an extraordinary series of events. It all began last year when actor Cliff Robertson discovered that he had been credited with a payment of $10,000 which he had never received. It turned out that a check for this amount had been forged and cashed by Begelman, who subsequently admitted to embezzling more than $60,000 from the studio. He was suspended on 30 September 1977, then reinstated in December when the studio, which still regarded him as an important future who had helped in its prosperity, hoped the furor had blown over. This proved to be wishful thinking, however, and casts an interesting light on the behavior of Hollywood studios and their executives.
- Ontario, CA, 7 April: The city's Film Classification Board has banned Louis Malle's film about a 12-year-old prostitute, Pretty Baby.
 - New York, 19 April: Eleven years after the Transamerica Corporation took over United Artists, five of the film company's main executives -- Arthur Krim, Robert Benjamin, Eric Pleskow, Mike Medavoy and William Bernstein -- have resigned. They have already announced their plan to form a new company called Orion Pictures and make a distribution deal with Warner Bros., which will be providing substantial financial backing for the new studio. Krim and Benjamin were responsible for revitalizing UA in the 1950s and 60s and had headed the company for 26 years, during which time it won many Oscars® and earned small but steady profits. Unfortunately, UA had a few bad years in the early 1970s which strained relations between Transamerica and the UA management. Though the company recovered and continued to do well, Krim and Benjamin were determined to regain their independence. The current Orion plan is the result of this determination.
- Switzerland, 17 May: Charles Chaplin's coffin and body have been recovered in the town of Noville, only a few kilometers from the cemetery in Vevey where his tomb was robbed. It is believed that the criminals were hoping to extort money from the Chaplin family. No arrests have been made.
- Bombay, 28 May: The kiss has come to the Hindi screen, shocking some and titilating others. Sashi Kapoor, India's answer to Robert Redford, kisses his co-star Zeenat Aman several times in a new film, Satyam Shivam Sundaram (Love Sublime), directed by his brother Raj. And although they are tame by Western standards, they are the first kisses on the Hindi screen for years. In the Indian cinema industry the film is seen as a landmark and as a sign of what the Government calls greater "creative freedom," after Indira Gandhi's authoritarian rule.
- New York, 11 June:
 After drawing crowds last year with his galvanic dancing in Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta has another smash with Grease. Based on the Broadway hit musical, it is a nostalgic trip back to the 1950s and stars Travolta and Olivia Newton-John as two kids at rockin' 'n' rollin' Rydell High School. This takeoff of Beach Party movies pulsates with terrific numbers, including "Summer Nights" and "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee." The cast includes such veterans as Eve Arden, Joan Blondell and Sid Caesar, as well as stars of the period pastiched, Frankie Avalon and Edd "Kookie" Byrnes. But the youngsters give strong performances, too. Aside from the stars, Stockard Channing, Jeff Conaway, Barry Pearl, Michael Tucci, Kelly Ward, Didi Conn, Jamie Donnelly and Dinah Manoff are particularly noteworthy.
- Los Angeles, 15 June: The Doheny Plaza theater, which had contracted to show the allegedly anti-Israel documentary by Vanessa Redgrave titled The Palestinian, was bombed at 4:26 a.m. today, causing an estimated $1,000 damage. Despite this, the theater said it would show the film tomorrow night as scheduled. Two suspects have been arrested. Although Redgrave has resolutely denied claims that she is anti-Semitic, she recently called for members of the British actors union to boycott Israel.
 - New York, 20 July: The ongoing controversy and publicity caused by the Begelman affair at Columbia during the past year, and related management problems, have now led to the firing of company President and Chief Executive Officer Alan Hirschfield. In fact, a difference of opinion as to how to deal with Begelman had opened up a rift between Hirschfield and Herbert Allen Jr., the most powerful member of the board of directors, whose company Allen & Co. had bought a controlling interest in the studio in 1973. In spite of the fact that Hirschfield had played a major role in the revival of the company, he was voted out of office by the board, with Chairman Leo Jaffe as the only one who opposed the move. In a masterful piece of understatment, the board's press release read, "It has recently become apparent that for Columbia to move forward to new levels of accomplishment, fresh leadership and greater management unity are required."
- New York, 28 July:
 Is this a new trend in the making? Writer Harold Ramis and director John Landis have concocted a new kind of college campus movie with National Lampoon's Animal House. Set sometime around the early 1960s, the story -- if story it can be called -- concerns the antics of a bunch of vulgar newcomers at a college who set out to disturb the stuffed-shirt order of things by their outrageous behavior. The movie, with its crude gags and anarchic set pieces, taking in everything from sexual escapades to bad table manners, is so over-the-top that it becomes quite absorbing. Watch out for gross John Belushi.
 - London, 10 August: After the "cute" violence of Bugsy Malone (1976), director Alan Parker has turned to the real thing in Midnight Express. It's the story of the ordeal suffered by young American Billy Hayes, played by Brad Davis, while serving a sentence in Turkey for drug smuggling. The physical and emotional brutalization to which Davis is exposed has prompted accusations that Parker has painted a racist picture of the Turks, but the appalling state of the Turkish penal system represents only half of the picture's arguments. The underlying theme tackles our deep-rooted fear of "otherness," which is an inescapable part of the human condition. Parker, himself a liberal-minded man, has defended himself vigorously against his critics.
- Copenhagen, 21 August: Release of Honning måne (Honeymoon) by Bille August, with Claus Stranberg and Kirsten Olesen as a couple who marry and face life in the Danish lower-middle class. We look forward to more from August, who really impresses with this directorial debut.
- Melbourne, 21 August:
 The flowering of the Australian film industry, helped by constructive government funding, is continuing apace. The latest homegrown offering to open here, titled The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, received warm plaudits in competition at Cannes earlier in the year. Now, local audiences have the opportunity to see director Fred Schepisi's well-made, absorbing film, which deals with the plight of a half-caste aborigine, Jimmie Blacksmith, very movingly portrayed by non-actor Tommy Lewis, who is caught in the trap of his mixed origins. Torn between the Christian teachings of his boyhood and the ancient aboriginal lore, Jimmie decides to join the native life of the city. He finds himself living in a squalid shanty town, while his efforts to find work are increasingly characterized by humiliation and degradation, although he marries a white servant girl. The tale ends in tragedy and bloodshed, leaving audiences to face a disturbing indictment of our destruction of another race's culture and dignity.
- Hollywood, 17 September: Director Michael Cimino has had discussions with Stephen Bach at United Artists about his proposed new project, The Johnson County War, a Western.
- Paris, 25 September: Director Eric Rohmer is shooting Perceval le Gallois in the Epinay studios, based on Chrétien de Troyes' epic poem that was inspired by the Knights of the Round Table.
 - Stockholm, 8 October: Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata) is Ingrid Bergman's first Swedish film in almost 40 years, and it was her namesake Ingmar Bergman who finally tempted her back to her native land. After some years in the kind of movies that hardly stretched her considerable talent, Miss Bergman has been handed one of her meatiest roles, in which she delivers a remarkable performance, displaying every aspect of her screen personality over the years -- naïvety, sophistication, gaiety and tragedy. Here, she plays Charlotte, a world-renowned concert pianist, who returns to Sweden to visit the two daughters she has not seen for many years, one married (Liv Ullmann) and the other severly handicapped (Lena Nyman). Charlotte has to face up to feelings of guilt for having put her career above her family, and the painful recognition that the past cannot be altered. The director, with a masterly use of close-up, and the flashback used as the subconscious, has created a work of Strindbergian intensity -- a long night's journey into day.
- New York, 19 October: The body of actor Gig Young was found lying beside that of his bride of three weeks. He was clutching a revolver. Police think the actor killed his wife before turning the gun on himself. Young made over 50 films during his career, including his Academy Award-winning performance in Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).
- Rio de Janiero, 23 October: Considered as the best Brazilian film for the year at the Festival de Brasilia, Tudo Bem (Everything's Alright), directed by Arnaldo Jabor, has now been released.
- Paris, 25 October: Release of Edouard Molinaro's La Cage aux folles (Birds of a Feather), based on a play by Jean Poiret, with Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi.
- Los Angeles, 27 October:
 In his latest film, Halloween, John Carpenter appears to have been afflicted with Psycho-sis. It's a horror film peppered with Hitchcockian shock cuts in which Jamie Leign Curtis (the daughter of Tony Curtis and Psycho's Janet Leigh) is pursued by a mad killer who himself seems to be unkillable. While the Bernard Herrmann-like theme (composed by the director) cranks up the tension, Carpenter's camera prowls through the night, always hinting at something horrible about to burst in from the periphery of the Panavision screen. Such plot as there is concerns an insane killer who first struck as a child on Halloween and threatens to do so again 15 years later. There are plenty of shocks along the way, and film buffs will spot the sly in-jokes Carpenter has buried in the film.
- Biarritz, 15 November: Bernard Marie, the deputy mayor of Biarritz, has announced the creation of an annual Latin American and Spanish film festival here.
- Paris, 25 November: Le Figaro magazine revealed in its latest issue that four giants of the American and English screen -- Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris -- all well-known to be heavy imbibers, have given up drinking.
- France, 30 November: The Center of Research into Advertising has revealed that 55 percent of the French people never to to the cinema. Audiences in the 15 to 20 age group (20 percent of the population) make up 52 percent of admissions.
- Paris, 5 December: Opening of an exhibition at the George Pompidou Center of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's original sketches and drawings.
 - New York, 15 December: Michael Cimino's second feature (following Thunderbolt and Lightfoot four years ago) is the epically conceived The Deer Hunter, which attempts to address the effect of the Vietnam War on the American psyche. The three-hour film accurately captures the mood in America at the moment -- the need to find some justification for the war. It focuses on the lives of three steelworkers -- Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage -- before, during and after their Vietnam experiences. Using the camera as an observer, Cimino allows the narrative to unfold in an almost documentary style. In the first half, two long sequences introduce us to the characters: an elaborate Ukranian wedding (practically a production number), and the deer-hunting expedition which foreshadows the horrors that await them in the jungles. In Vietnam, there is a gripping set piece when the friends are forced to play a game of Russian roulette by their Viet Cong captors, a scene which has been criticized for depicting the enemy as the incarnation of evil, without comment on the American tactics. De Niro, Walken and Savage deliver Oscar®-calibre performances, and they are ably supported on the home front by Meryl Streep, John Cazale, Chuck Aspegren and George Dzundza.
- New York, 15 December:
 Joel Schuster and Jerome Segal's comic-strip hero Superman made his screen debut in Sam Katzman's gimcrack 1948 serial. This time, at considerably greater expense, Christopher Reeve, in only his second film, assumes the title role of the Man of Steel in Superman -- The Movie, directed by Richard Donner. Sidestepping the camp clichés celebrated by Batman 12 years ago, Donner and his screenwriting team tread a fine line between gently satirizing the original character and hymning his superhuman feats of strength. Reeve, an accomplished stage actor with an academic background, brings bags of ironic charm to the role of the self-effacing Clark Kent -- dispensing a stream of earnest advice to Margo Kidder's Lois Lane -- and dons his alter ego's red cape and blue tights with equal aplomb. His chiseled features and formidable physique, specially built up for the role, are the perfect expression of the fantasy hero lurking in the breast of every 98-pound weakling. Gene Hackman was reportedly paid $2 million to play Superman's eccentric enemy, Lex Luthor, but he looks far less happy in the role. Marlon Brando was paid even more, at least $2.5 million, to play Superman's father in the opening sequence when the infant Kal-El is dispatched to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton. Producer Alexander Salkind peppers the supporting cast with more strong performers: Ned Beatty as Hackman's stooge, Otis; Jackie Cooper as Clark Kent's boss, Perry White; Glenn Ford as Clark's foster-dad, Jonathan Kent; Valerie Perrine as the sultry Miss Teschmacher; Terence Stamp as General Zod; and Susannah York as Lara, Kal-El's mother on Krypton. It was worth every cent in publicity which, in the breatless build-up to Superman's release, was summed up in the slogan, "You'll believe a man can fly!" Superman's special effects ensure that you will.
- Paris, 26 December: Between December 17 and 25 this year, the three television channels programmed 28 movies. Some cinema professionals are uneasy about this profusion of films on TV.
- Hollywood, 31 December: The studios have announced a 5 percent increase in takings from U.S. releases this year. Richard Donner's Superman is well in the lead with $80 million in box office receipts.
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14 June - Chicago, IL, 
26 August - Phoenix, AZ, 
30 September - Las Vegas, NV,