- Hollywood, 1 January:
 The film company executive Sherry Lansing has been appointed president at 20th Century-Fox, the first time in the history of Hollywood that a woman has occupied such a position (although 60 years ago Mary Pickford was one of the founders of United Artists and played a major role in the running of the company). Lansing first became involved in films as an actress in Loving and Rio Lobo (both 1970) and numerous TV shows. She worked for a time as a story editor at MGM, and then became the vice-president in charge of production at Columbia before she was offered her new post.
- New York, 3 January: Peter Yates' Breaking Away was awarded top film honors yesterday at the 35-member National Film Society of Film Critics. This populist story by Steve Tesich about four cycling midwestern locals who race against all odds also took the best screenplay award. Runners-up to Yates's film were Woody Allen's Manhattan and Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer.
- Hollywood, 3 January: The venerable Master of Suspense has received a knighthood and is now Alfred Hitchcock. The British consul here personally took the news to the director at Universal Studios.
- New York, 28 January: A record high first-run admission price of $7.50 will be charged for Bob Guccione's $17 million film Caligula when it has its American premiere on 1 February at the Penthouse East Theater here.
 - New York, 1 February: Richard Gere has his best role to date in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo. He lets his brooding good looks and perfectly muscled body do the talking as Julian Kay, the high-class L.A. stud of the title who can satisfy rich women by remains unfulfilled himself until he is redeemed by Lauren Hutton. Schrader has lifted the final sequence straight from Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), but American Gigolo does not carry the weight of that austere masterpiece. Schrader is an interesting character, an intellectual in Hollywood whose strict Calvinist upbringing meant that he did not see a film until the age of 17. His work retains a puritanical streak.
- Bagdad, 7 February: The Iraqi government has created the Babylone production company by grouping together the private and public sectors of the industry.
- New York, 12 February: Release of Cruising, directed by William Friedkin and staring Al Pacino. Shooting of the film proved difficult due to demonstrations by the gay community. Many people are demanding that an X replace the picture's R rating.
- Paris, 13 February: Roman Polanski's Tess has won the César for best film and best director. Miou-Miou was named best actress for La Dérobade and Claude Brasseur best actor for Robin Davis' La Guerre des polices. The César for the best foreign film went to Woody Allen's Manhattan. Three special Césars were awarded to Louis de Funès, Kirk Douglas and producer Pierre Braunberger.
- Los Angeles, 17 February: John Huston has directed a biting satire on obsessive, fundamentalist religion. Wise Blood is adapted from Flannery O'Connor's novel, with Brad Dourif, Harry Dean Stanton and Daniel Shor heading the cast.
- Kinshasa, 21 February: General Mobutu, the head of state of Zaire, has decided to nationalize Cofilmex, a distribution company financed from Belgium.
- Berlin, 27 February:
 Even though John Gielgud, the great English classical stage actor, has worked with some of the best film directors -- Alfred Hitchcock (The Secret Agent, 1936), Laurence Olivier (Hamlet, 1948), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Julius Caesar, 1953) and Orson Welles (Chimes at Midnight, 1966) -- his long but intermittent career on screen has seldom done him justice. However, he gave an unforgettable performance as the witty, bilious, dying novelist in Alain Resnais' Providence three years ago, and has now been given almost a good a role as the title character in Dyrygent (The Conductor), Andrzej Wajda's latest film. Though Gielgud is unfortunately deprived here of one of his most distinguished and distinguishing features -- his mellifluous voice --- through the Polish dubbing, he remains outstanding even with a borrowed voice. In this film, he plays a celebrated Polish-born conductor who returns to his birthplace after 50 years in the U.S. Although old and dying, he is able to electrify a struggling provincial orchestra, something its own conductor has never been able to do. The younger man's feelings of inadequacy put a strain on his marriage. The screenplay by Andrzej Kijowski hints at a deeper meaning, which suggests a parable on Polish feelings of inferiority.
 - Philadelphia, 7 March: In Coal Miner's Daughter, Sissy Spacek's abundant talent is tested to the full as she matures from an unworldly 13-year-old to a country music star battling drug addiction and marital breakdown. The film tells the story of Loretta Lynn, the girl from Butcher's Hollow in the Appalachians, who was married at 13, a mother of three at 18 and a star of the Grand Ol' Opry by her late 20s. Neatly negotiating the pitfalls of the standard rags-to-riches biopic, Coal Miner's Daughter also gives Spacek the opportunity to do her own singing, coming creditably close to capturing Lynn's trademark glottal catch. Tommy Lee Jones, an underrated actor whose intense, reflective style catches the dark side of the good ol' boy persona, provides superb support as Doolittle Lynn, Loretta's pushy but vulnerable husband. And there is good work, too, from Beverly D'Angelo as another country legend with a great voice, the tragic Patsy Cline. The film is skillfully directed by an Englishman, Michael Apted, who was called in as a last-minute replacement for Joseph Sargent, who had refused to work with Spacek. Apted claims that Appalachia is not so very different from the north of England, where he cut his directing teeth in television.
- Hollywood, 11 March: Francis Ford Coppola has bought the Hollywood General Studios for $6.7 million after three months of negotiations. Coppola's plans for the studios, renamed Zoetrope, include the creation of a "complete, fully integrated film studio with the best features of the studios of the 1930s and 1940s."
- Rome, 31 March:
 After dealing with the eternal masculine myth in Fellini's Casanova, Federico Fellini has now turned his attention to the emancipation of women and tries to come to terms with the feminists in his latest film, La Città delle donne (City of Women). As a train enters a
tunnel (à la North by Northwest, in the first of many visual homages), Snàporaz (Marcello Mastroianni, the director's favorite alter ego) awakens to find himself sitting opposite a severely suited but attractive woman (Bernice Stegers), while a small gathering of pre-pubescent girls enthusiastically gaze at the pair from outside their berth. The woman subtly flirts and Snàporaz becomes like putty, desperately following her to the trainÕs restroom, but she declares that she must depart even though the train has stopped in the middle of a meadow with no civilization in sight. The smitten Snàporaz continues to track the woman through the woods until arriving at a hotel that is hosting a surrealistic feminist convention. He finds himself in a world where he is the only man in an all-female society. And, while this has always been Fellini's fantasy (in films such as 8½, 1963), it now becomes a surrealistic voyage of discovery into the nature of woman. Upon the release of La Città delle donne Fellini has been accused of being anti-feminist -- rather ironic since it is difficult to think of another director who has portrayed as many strong women in film. It's closer to the truth that Fellini worships women. In a 29 March interview for La Stampa Fellini told Lietta Tornabuoni: "Women are everything. I even see the cinema itself as a woman, with its alternation of light and darkness, of appearing and disappearing images. Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb, you sit there still and meditative in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen. One should go to the cinema with the innocence of a fetus." Even though Fellini admits that he was unfamiliar with feminist political ideology until making this film, the accusation seems ludicrous in that La Città delle donne really portrays a womanizer's worst nightmare. Snáporaz may be surrounded by women, but he clearly becomes a weakling and behaves very much like a puppet in the hands of the various women. Throughout the film the women are clearly in total control, and note the "knowing" looks that the three women give each other in the final sequence on the train and how Snáporaz symbolically returns to the womb by going back to sleep in near fetal position. What is the mysterious secret that these women share?
 - Los Angeles, 14 April: Although Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was nominated in eight categories at this year's Oscar® ceremony, this $31.5 million film about the Vietnam War was virtually ignored (winning Best Cinematography and Best Sound), as were other of the year's blockbusters. The Academy favored the smaller-scale movies, especially the tug-of-war child custody drama, Kramer vs. Kramer, which gathered five Oscars®: Best Picture, Best Director (Robert Benton), Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman, after three previous nominations), Best Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Screenplay (Benton). Known principally as TV's Gidget, Sally Field blossomed into a superb dramatic performer in the title role of the gutsy union organizer in Martin Ritt's Norma Rae to with the Best Actress award. The 79-year-old Melvyn Douglas gained the Best Supporting Actor prize for his dying financier in Being There.
- New Delhi, 18 April: The National Film Development Corporation, a central group of film producers and exporters, has been created to promote Indian films.
- Hollywood, 9 June: Actor Richard Pryor has suffered serious burns. According to a police report, he was experimenting with a mixture of cocaine and ether which caught fire as he was inhaling it. He is said to be in critical condition.
 - Hollywood, 29 April:
 The great British-born director Alfred Hitchcock died early this morning at his Bellagio Road home in Bel Air, which he had shared with his wife Alma since 1942. The last year of his life had, unfortunately, been a sad one for Hitch. In May he finally closed his office at Universal Studios, since it had been apparent for some time that he was no longer capable of directing a new picture. He had completed his last feature, Family Plot, in 1975 and had recently put a good deal of time and effort into a new script adaptation of the novel, The Short Night, based on the true story of British spy George Blake. He was briefly cheered by a visit from one of his favorite stars, Ingrid Bergman, in August, and was included in the Queen's Christmas Honours List in December. His knighthood was officially presented by the British consul at a brief ceremony at Universal on 3 January this year. It is exactly 60 years since the young Hitchcock entered the British film industry as a designer of film titles, a modest beginning for one of the most memorably original and creative careers in the history of the cinema.
- New York, 21 May:
 According to producer Gary Kurtz, the spectacular new space epic, The Empire Strikes Back, should not be regarded merely a sequel to Star Wars (1977), but as the second part of a trilogy which is itself -- as conceived by the creator of the series, George Lucas -- the middle of three trilogies. The extraordinary success of the first one made it certain that Lucas would proceed with other films in the cycle, though this time he has stayed more in the background. He is credited with the original story and as executive producer, while the spectacular effects were created by his own Industrial Light and Magic Co. in Marin County, California. However, Lucas here has handed the directing reins to the veteran Irvin Kershner, best known for his handling of unusual contemporary subjects in A Fine Madness (1966) and Loving (1970). This film is a darker, more somber entry, considered by many fans as the best in the series. Gone is the jaunty swashbuckling of the first film; the rebellion led by Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) suffers before the superior forces of the Empire, young hero Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) faces his first defeats as he attempts to harness the Force under the tutelage of Jedi master Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz), and cocky Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is betrayed by former ally Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams). In the tradition of the great serials, this film is left with a hefty cliffhanger. Since the new film is financed by Lucasfilm with Fox serving only as distributor, the budget of $22 million is more generous (almost double) than for Star Wars and, if it is anywhere nearly as successful, we shall doubtless be seeing more films in the intended cycle over the coming years.
 - Cannes, 23 May:
 The top prizes at this year's Cannes Film Festival were divided among three very different films, though each displayed its director at the height of his powers. Unhappily, among those on the jury there was disagreement as to their merits. The Palme d'Or was shared by Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha and Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. A favorite for the best film award was Alain Resnais' Mon Oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle), the cause of a dispute between Kirk Douglas, the president of the jury, and several of its members who accused him of not taking the Resnais film into consideration. A compromise was reached by awarding Mon Oncle d'Amérique the Special Jury Prize. When it was presented to Resnais, it was explained that "in the spirit of the Festival, the Golden Palm and the Special Jury Prize are on the same level." Resnais' fascinating film is based on the theories of the animal behaviorist Dr. Henri Laborit, who plays himself. Resnais applies these to the lives of three people, brilliantly cutting between them. Kagemusha, Kurosawa's first film for years, is one of the most expensive ever made in Japan. The screen is splendidly used to frame the grandeur of this 16th-century tale of a thief employed as the double or kagemusha of a clan leader, in order to confuse the enemy. Unforgettable are the sunsets, vivid rainbows, the multi-colored flags of soldiers and the dreamlike battle scenes with horses and men dying in slow motion. All That Jazz, already acclaimed in the U.S., is an unusual Felliniesque musical on the unlikely subject of Bob Fosse's own heart operation, and his relations with his wife, his mistress and his daughter.
- New York, 23 May:
 In The Shining, from the novel by Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick exchanges the outer space of 2001 for the inner space of a disintegrating mind. Jack Nicholson plays blocked writer Jack Torrance who takes a job as a winter caretaker in a huge hotel, the Overlook, in the snowbound Colorado Rockies (actually Oregon's Timberline Lodge). Haunted by his creative failure, and the ghosts that populate the Overlook's agonizingly empty spaces, Nicholson is overwhelmed by homicidal dementia, taking an axe to the hotel's only other occupants: his wife Shelley Duvall and small son Danny Lloyd. Kubrick's Steadicam camera roves through the Overlook's numbing emptiness, capturing one heart-stopping moment of horror as the elevator doors in the deserted lobby slide open to disgorge a tidal wave of blood.
- Hollywood, 17 June: The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's horror bestseller, opened 13 June across North America to blockbuster business, grossing a truly phenomenal $7,763,426 at 747 theaters in three days. The totals represent the biggest opening day and opening weekend for any film in the history of Warner Bros.
- Los Angeles, 18 July: Release of The Big Red One, Samuel Fuller's first film since 1972, with Lee Marvin, Robert Carradine and Mark Hamill.
 - New York, 28 July: Director Brian De Palma has revealed both his skill and his taste for blood in five weird, occult-laden movies -- Sisters (1973), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Obsession (1976), Carrie (also 1976) and most recently, The Fury (1978) -- which have certainly seemed to please audiences. However, his newest film, Dressed to Kill, is outraging feminists, who are picketing the theaters where it is showing and voicing their disapproval of the sadistic and perverted flavor of the plot, which they consider to be anti-women. Audiences in general will have to judge the issue for themselves. What nobody can argue about, however, is the expertise with which De Palma unfolds this tale of a misogynistic serial killer whose target is murdering women. This is an all-and-out slasher movie that will appeal to fans of the genre, and which boasts Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and De Palma's wife Nancy Allen in the cast.
- London, 29 July: The story of American Communist John Reed is told in Reds, which is moving to the completion of its filming here. Warren Beatty, starring as Reed, is also directing this ambitious project, his first solo attempt behind the camera.
- Paris, 3 August: Several thousand reels of film went up in smoke in a fire that ravaged the stockpile in the Cinémathèque Française. The disaster came at the worst possible time: the Cinémathèque has been in disarray since Henri Langlois's death in 1977. The fire raises the question of finances, since present funding is insufficient to carry insurance on the contents of the Cinémathèque. The Minister for Culture, Jean-Philippe Lecat, has announced an emergency allocation of 4 million francs for the construction of a new building in Bois-d'Arcy.
- Paris, 1 September: From today, cinema prices are no longer fixed and will be available at half-price on Mondays.
 - Venice, 5 September:
 Two American films shared this year's Golden Lion at Venice, both revealing the seamier side of life stateside. Louis Malle's third U.S. movie, Atlantic City, stars Burt Lancaster as a man from the gangster past, trying to survive on lies, who get involved with present day small-time crooks. The different values of the past and the present, and the old and the young, are captured with a subtle eye for detail and lives lived in the literally crumbling and tawdry city of the title. Gena Rowlands, in her husband John Cassavetes's latest film, Gloria, is an ordinary woman in her 40s, suddenly having to flee the Mafia with an eight-year-old boy who has a diary of all their nefarious activities. The probing movie, with a marvelous performance from Rowlands, moves at a brisk pace. The same cannot be said of Alexander the Great by Theo Angelopoulos, who won the best director award. Angelopoulos takes his time to unfold this 210-minute allegory of Greek socialism. He uses numerous show pans, pauses and long takes, but it is often intriguing and superb to look at. Ironically, the Alexander of the title is not the famous Macedonian general, but a bandit who has helped the peasants overthrow their feudal masters.
- Paris, 17 September:
 François Truffaut has claimed that his new movie Le Dernier métro (The Last Metro), has fulfilled three of his ambitions: to recreate on film the climate of the Occupation, to show the backstage life of the theater and to provide Catherine Deneuve with the role of a responsible woman. This work achieves all three. Set in Paris in 1942, it tells of a Jewish manager of a Montmartre theater (Heinz Bennent), forced into hiding in the cellar of his building while his wife (Deneuve) runs the acting company. This includes a member of the Resistance (Gérard Depardieu), who falls in love with her. Ironically, this entertaining and gripping drama, shot entirely in a studio, closely resembles the kind of "quality French film" that the young critic Truffaut despised.
- Hollywood, 17 September: Negotiations between professional unions and producers have started again after a break of 12 days.
 - New York, 19 September: With Ordinary People, Robert Redford has triumphantly demonstrated that there is more to him than a dazzling smile. He has made his debut as a director with an adaptation of an unpublished novel by Judith Guest, a Minnesota housewife. It's an understated family drama in which the middle-class harmony of married couple Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland is threatened by the nervous breakdown of their surviving younger son Timothy Hutton. Psychiatrist Judd Hirsch can provide no easy answers. In a film infused with Redford's humane liberalism, Hutton gives an outstanding performance as the young man haunted by his brother's death. He is the son of amiable leading man Jim Hutton, who died last year.
- Paris, 24 September: Italian director Ettore Scola is in Paris for the release of his film La Terrazza (The Terrace).
- Hollywood, 26 September: Release of Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, his most expensive film to date, starring Allen, Charlotte Rampling Jessica Harper, and the French actress Marie-Christine Barrault. The film cost $10 million to make.
- New York, 26 September:
 Jonathan Demme takes a sideways look at the American Dream in Melvin and Howard. It's based on the true story of one Melvin Dummer, an all-American loser who may (or may not) have stopped on the Nevada highway one night to pick up a wild-haired tramp who may (or may not) have been eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. When Hughes died, Melvin produced a will naming him as the heir to the Hughes fortune. Melvin never saw a cent but Demme fashions a poignant comedy around the tale, with Paul Le Mat as Melvin, Mary Steenburgen providing many laughs as his stripper wife, and Jason Robards playing "Howard Hughes." The real Melvin appears briefly as a bus depot counterman.
- Hollywood, 23 October: One of the longest and most damaging strikes in the history of Hollywood has ended. The members of the Screen Actors Guild have signed a new, three-year contract with the producers that should keep everyone satisfied for years to come. Reflecting the recent rapid growth in the video and cable television markets, and the importance to the actors of so-called ancillary rights, the strike began on 21 July when SAG and AFTRA (the union of television and radio performers) found themselves in disagreement with the production companies over a new scale of salaries plus a share of valuable new ancillary rights. The shooting of 11 films and 45 TV series was immediately interrupted, although 14 other features, including Milos Forman's Ragtime, were able to proceed with production as planned, due to a special interim agreement with their producers.
- Washington, DC, 4 November: Ronald Reagan has been elected President of the United States. The former actor gave up films in 1964 after making The Killers. Twice elected governor of California (in 1966 and 1970) he has been working towards this moment for the last five years. He will be sworn in at the Capitol on 20 January.
- New York, 14 November:
 Films about the fight game have an honorable place in the history of Hollywood, but none of them have had the crunching immediacy of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert De Niro stars as New York's Jake La Motta, one of the hardest middleweights ever to pull on the gloves and a man whose biggest opponent was himself. To play La Motta in bloated middle age, De Niro refused prosthetics and put on 55 pounds in an eating marathon in France and Italy. The scorching fight scenes, brilliantly edited by Thelma Schoonmaker with sickening sound effects by Frank E. Warner, capture the savage beauty of prizefighting in all its sweat-drenched, blood-spattered glory.
- New York, 20 November: After fruitful negotiations with Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard's examination of sexual relationships, Sauve qui peut (la vie), has been released under the title Every Man for Himself (aka Slow Motion). The film is proving popular with both New York audiences and critics.
 - Hollywood, 19 December: After Heaven's Gate was lambasted by the critics on its first showing, United Artists got it reduced from 225 minutes to 148. The director Michael Cimino had originally offered the studio a film that lasted five-and-a-half hours. As the budget for this epic Western had escalated from $11 million to over $35 million, it is unlikely to recover even a fraction of this amount at the box office. Therefore, the movie threatens to be the most expensive flop of all time, and the ruin of UA. As a result of the severe cutting, the sprawling narrative on the Johnson County War between the cattlemen and the immigrant farmers becomes confusing at times. However, there is still a virtuoso sweep to some of the panoramic ensembles.
- Munich, 29 December: The last 13 episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 26-episode Berlin Alexanderplatz are being shown on television. The director considers this epic piece of filmmaking (drawn from a novel by Alfred Doblin and starring Gunter Lamprecht, Barbara Sukowa and Hanna Schygulla) to be his major work.
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1 January - Palm Desert, CA, 
2 May - Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, CA,