- Simi Valley, CA, 1 January:
 Raoul Walsh, one of Hollywood's most durable and prolific directors, has died aged 93. Although best known for his Westerns, action movies and thrillers, he handled a wide variety of films during his 50-year career, from The Life of General Villa in 1914 to A Distant Trumpet in 1964. It was in the mid-1920s that Walsh emerged as a leading talent with The Thief of Bagdad (1924) starring Douglas Fairbanks, the smash-hit What Price Glory? (1926) and Sadie Thompson (1928) in which he also co-starred with Gloria Swanson. (An accident in which he lost an eye ended his acting career.) Independent-minded, he did not function well within the constraints of the studio system until he joined Warner Bros. in 1939 where his career was revitalized, beginning with The Roaring Twenties and including Objective, Burma! (1945), the masterly Pursued (1947) and White Heat (1949). He remained active for a further 15 years until he retired.
- Berlin, 1 January: The Golden Bear at this year's Berlin Festival has gone to Spain. The winner was Deprisa, Deprisa, directed by Carlos Saura.
 - Avoiraz, 19 January: The young American director David Lynch, who made the cult movie Eraserhead, was eagerly awaited at the Festival of Fantasy and Horror at Avoriaz, where he was to present his new film, The Elephant Man. Lynch and the picture got a warm reception, and it was not surprising that it won the Grand Prix. Made in England and produced by Mel Brooks, this bizarre and moving story, set in Victorian London, is based on fact. It is the story of John Merrick (John Hurt), a horribly deformed young man, yet sensitive and intelligent, who lives as a circus freak until he is rescued by Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), and brought to a hospital where he can be studied and helped. With superb black-and-white photography by Freddie Francis, Lynch wonderfully evokes the period. The cast is splendid, especially by suffering Hurt, hidden behind extraordinary makeup by Christopher Tucker.
- New York, 20 January:
 It's fourth time around for James M. Cain's noir Depression-era classic, The Postman Always Rings Twice. The first was the French Le Dernier tournant (1939), the second was the Italian Luchino Visconti's version, Ossessione (1942), and in 1946 Hollywood made it a vehicle for Lana Turner, luring drifter John Garfield into a plot to kill her elderly husband. Swathed in dazzling white, Turner created a memorable image of low-rent carnality. Now director Bob Rafelson takes up the baton and it's the turn of Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange to portray the doomed couple. In 1946 the steamy side of Cain's story was watered down to meet the requirements of the Hays Office, but 35 years on such restraints no longer apply and David Mamet's screenplay remains faithful to the original. Lange, who made the most inauspicious of film debuts five years ago in the remake of King Kong, gives a performance that crackles with sleazy sexual static. There is a story doing the rounds that Lange and Nicholson's acting was so realistically torrid that Rafelson had to leave a lot of footage on the cutting room floor.
- New York, 23 January: Radio City Music Hall is screening the uncut version, with soundtrack, of Abel Gance's Napoléon. The film is being presented by Francis Ford Coppola, whose father, Carmine Coppola, composed the music.
- Burkina Faso, 23 February: Souleymane Cissé's film Finyé (The Wind) has won the top award at the eighth Ouagadougou Film Festival. A special prize was awarded to Gaston Kaboré for Wend Kuni (The Gift of God).
 - Paris, 25 February: The poster for Pascal Thomas' film Celles qu'on n'a pas eues (The Girls We Never Had), which was drawn by Topor, has been judged indecent and is banned from train and metro stations. Even the entertainment guide L'Officiel des spectacles, has refused to include it. Thomas' film is a humourous look at the romantic frustrations of modern men and women told through short stories.
- Paris, 4 March: The first film in Eric Rohmer's new series entitled "Comedies and Proverbs," La Femme de l'aviateur (The Aviator's Wife), is a youthful comedy of errors with a lightness of tone not present in his previous, rather more serious cycle of "Six Moral Tales" [opening with La Boulangère de Monceau (The Baker of Monceau) in 1962, and finishing with L'Amour l'après-midi (Love in the Afternoon) in 1972]. In La Femme de l'aviateur, a young student (Philippe Marlaud) is devastated when he finds that his girlfriend is cheating on him. In order to find out why she did it, he decides to spy on her and her lover.
- New York, 7 March: The influential film critic Bosley Crowther has died of heart failure. The outspoken, movie-loving Crowther wrote the daily reviews as well as Sunday overview pieces for the New York Times. He received the first award for film criticism from the Screen Directors' Guild in 1954 and was named critic emeritus of the Times in 1967.
- Hollywood, 10 March:
 Francis Ford Coppola is one filmmaker who is not afraid of taking risks. Having experienced terrible problems in shooting his ambitious Vietnam movie, Apocalypse Now (1979), on location in the Philippines at a cost of over $30 million -- it was originally budgeted at $12 million -- he appears to be having similar difficulties with his latest project, One from the Heart. A totally studio-bound production and, in marked contrast to the harsh realities of his previous film, a kind of musical fantasy, it started life as a relatively modest idea. However, escalating costs of elaborate sets and electronic equipment are threatening to get out of control. Coppola bought the old Hollywood General Studios a year ago, renamed it Zoetrope, and planned to make it a haven for crative filmmakers. Unfortunately, one of the very first productions, Hammett directed by Wim Wenders, immediately ran into trouble and was shut down before completion. Now Coppola is having teething problems with his own film. Using the latest video and computer technology, which he refers to as "The Electronic Cinema," he finds that the money is already running out, he is having trouble meeting his payroll, and will be forced to close other departments of the studio to complete One from the Heart. The success of the Zoetrope experiment hangs in the balance.
- Hollywood, 10 March: Disney Pictures has announced the creation of the Disney Channel, their own pay-cable talevision channel.
 - Paris, 11 March: Diva, the first feature by 35-year-old Jean-Jacques Beineix, is enthusing Parisian audiences. It is not difficult to understand the reason for its success, especially among the young. The director, who has made film commercials, has brought much of the slick style of advertisements to bear on this tale of a young postal messenger's obsession with an opera singer. Mixing fact and fantasy, violence and romance, and adventurous camerawork, it is a flashy package of ultra-chic designer images and punk aesthetics. Yet beneath the surface gloss is an intriguing film noir plot, and an homage to the dark world of the silent Louis Feuillade serials. A striking debut.
- Paris, 15 March: The distinguished French filmmaker René Clair has died. Clair's career spanned four decades and produced such French classics as À nous la liberté, Le Million and Les Belles de nuit (Beauties of the Night), as well as several American films including The Flame of New Orleans, I Married a Witch and It Happened Tomorrow.
- Paris, 30 March: Georges Franju has resigned from his position as artistic director of the Cinémathèque due to internal problems. He was one of its founders.
 - Los Angeles, 31 March:
 One of Hollywood's most popular leading men, Robert Redford, who has never won an Oscar® for acting, managed to carry off the coveted Best Director award on his first attempt for Ordinary People. The film, produced by Redford's Wildwood Enterprises, also won Best Picture, Best Screenplay (based on another medium) and Best Supporting Actor for Timothy Hutton, son of the lanky Jim Hutton, who died in 1979. The 19-year-old Hutton, the youngest winner of the award, plays a tormented boy struggling to come to terms with the drowning death of his older brother in a sailing accident. His guilt and suicide attempts force his wealthy, middle-class parents (Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore) to confront the realities of their unhappy marriage. Country singer Loretta Lynn and boxer Jake La Motta were both in the audience to witness the stars who played them on screen collect the Best Actor and Actress Oscars® -- Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter and Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears is only the second Soviet film (after War and Peace in 1969) to win the Foreign Language Film Oscar®. This work from Vladimir Menshov is a well-acted comedy-drama about the loves and lives of three Russian girls in 1958.
 - Cannes, 27 May:
 Five years ago Andrzej Wajda became spokesman for the movement for change in Poland as reflected in his film Czlowiek z Marmuru (Man of Marble). Since then, the free trade union organization Solidarity has become a leading political force in the country. Taking account of the changing reality of Poland, Wajda has followed up on the earlier film with a sequel titled Czlowiek z Zelaza (Man of Iron), which has received the Golden Palm. It takes the form of an investigation by a radio reporter, expected to cover the 1980 Gdansk shipyard strike from the official point of view, who meets the son of 1950s worker hero Mateusz Birkut (the Man of Marble), now married to a dissident filmmaker. The personal story is linked with the wider struggle for the recognition of Solidarity. Filmed under enormous pressure during the actual events, it leaps off the screen like the day's headlines. The best actress award went to Isabelle Adjani for her performances in both James Ivory's Quartet and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession, while Ugo Tognazzi was considered best actor for Bernardo Bertolucci's La Tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), the director's first film for many years to deal with contemporary Italy. The jury, presided over by French director Jacques Deray, presented their Special Jury Prize to Swiss director Alain Tanner, who recently underwent heart surgery, for Les Années lumière (Light Years Away), his first film in English, a magical folk tale set in Ireland and starring British actor Trevor Howard.
- Paris, 28 May: Frances' new Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy has formed his government and has appointed Jack Lang as Minister of Cultural Affairs.
- Hollywood, 12 June:
 The complete box-office failure of Michael Cimino's $40 million Western, Heaven's Gate, and continuing financial problems in the company, have persuaded Transamerica, United Artists' parent company, that this is a good time to sell the studio. Kirk Kerkorian at MGM has now acquired UA, along with its valuable backlog of old movies for the relatively modest sum of $370 million, far less than the $700 million recently paid by oil tycoon Marvin Davis for 20th Century-Fox. Clearly, UA never recovered from the loss of its top management team three years ago, and this sale is the result.
 - New York, 12 June: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have joined forces to re-create the thrills and spills of the Saturday morning serial with Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is a no-holds-barred celebration of the stunt-packed cliffhangers churned out by Republic, Columbia and Universal in Hollywood's heyday. But while classics like The Green Hornet and Secret Agent X-9 were produced on a wing and a prayer, Raiders cost $22 million, much of it devoted to state-of-the-art special effects supplied by Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic. In the days of Buck Rogers, exotic locations were created in the Californian hills and deserts, but filming Raiders live action has taken actors and crew to France, Tunisia, Hawaii and Britain's Elstree studios. Harrison Ford stars as Indiana Jones, the rugged 1930s archaeologist-adventurer who puts his bullwhip to good use in routing a bunch of evil Nazis searching for the Ark of the Covenant, possession of which will confer unlimited power. Apparently Tom Selleck was the first choice but was unavailable. Ford has seized his chance with both hands and director Spielberg has peppered the picture with a host of movie in-jokes that are calculated to delight film buffs.
- New York, 5 July: West Coast punk rockers the Alice Big Band, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks and Catholic Discipline are documented by director Penelope Spheeris in her first feature film, The Decline of Western Civilization, which is being released today.
- New York, 17 July:
 John Gielgud has long regarded movie-making with an air of studied perplexity, making periodic forays into it with the air of an innocent happy to carry away large sacks of money. In recent years, richly rewarded cameos have outnumbered the parts that have released his powers -- the dithering Lord Raglan in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) or the dying novelist in Providence (1977). Now, in Arthur, the latest (frankly feeble) attempt to revive screwball comedy, Gielgud demonstrates his impeccable comic pedigree. Cast as spoiled millionaire Dudley Moore's profane valet, Gielgud delivers a string of expletives with a Shakespearean air and walks off with the movie.
- Paris, 9 September: Opening of Pour la peau d'un flic (For a Cop's Hide), Alain Delon's first film as writer-director, with himself and Anne Parillaud.
 - New York, 11 September: One of Brazil's leading post-cinema novo directors, the Argentinian-born Hector Babenco, has gained his first international success with Pixote, which has just opened here. Babenco originally intended this film on the plight of Brazil's three million abandoned children to be a documentary, and had completed 200 hours of interviews with children in reform schools. But when he was refused further access, he turned to the streets and got the children to play themselves. The result is that the performances by the kids, who improvised their own lines, are impressively natural. The plot itself is a sordid one, involving the eponymous 10-year-old boy (Fernando Ramos da Silva) in drugs and prostitution, leading to his arrest and confinement.
- Berlin, 15 September:
 Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, West Germany's most expensive film to date -- with a budget of $12 million -- is one of the most gripping and authentic war movies ever made. Based on an autobiographical novel by German World War II photographer Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, the film follows the lives of the fearless captain of U-96 Jürgen Prochnow and his inexperienced crew as they patrol the Atlantic and Mediterranean in search of Allied vessels, taking turns as hunter and prey. There's very little plot, so the movie's power comes from both its riveting battle scenes and its details of the boring hours spent waiting for orders or signs of the enemy. With the exception of one staunch Hitler Youth lieutenant, none of the crew is particularly loyal to the Nazis, and some are openly hostile toward their Führer; this allows viewer sympathy with the men as they perform their laborious, monotonous duties in cramped, filthy quarters, or await death as depth charges explode all around the sub. Prochnow is excellent as the nerves-of-steel commander, and many of the supporting actors -- all German -- are solid as well, although some of the characterizations border on war movie clichés (the young crewman who has left behind his pregnant girlfriend, the Chief Engineer whose wife is seriously ill). The real star, however, is cinematographer Jost Vacano, who makes the sub's grimy, claustrophobic interior come to vivid life, as his Steadicam follows the crew through hatches, up ladders, into bunks, and under pipes, creating a palpable sense of claustrophobia while injecting it with movement. Wrtier-director Petersen originally edited Das Boot as both a two-and-a-half hour theatrical release and a six-hour German miniseries. -- Don Kaye, All Movie Guide
 - Melbourne, 16 September: Director Peter Weir's Gallipoli is an engrossing drama that follows the fortunes of youthful idealists Mark Lee and Mel Gibson from their decision to join up in World War I to the horror of the trenches in the Dardanelles in 1915. Their developing friendship amid adversity is the principal theme of Gallipoli, which sees the war from an Australian point of view. As the third wave of young volunteers prepares to attack in the movie's meticulously realized climactic battle, their fatherly commanding officer tells them, "Remember, you are men from Western Australia." The film's final, frozen frame is reminiscent of a photograph taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, depicting a soldier at the moment of death.
- New York, 18 September:
 The impressive technical powers of Meryl Streep are on display in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Karel Reisz's film adapted by Harold Pinter from the novel by John Fowles. She has transformed herself, complete with English accent, into the raven-haired pre-Raphaelite beauty of the title, the governess in Victorian England stranded between geologist Jeremy Irons and the memory of her vanished French officer lover. It's a formidable performance in a handsome picture which falters because of Pinter's failure to translate the intricated structure of Fowles' best-seller to the screen.
 - New York, 18 September: In her autobiography, Joan Crawford wrote, "of all actresses to me Faye Dunaway has the talent and courage to make a real star." Were she alive today, she might be less flattering about Dunaway's extraordinary impersonation of her in Mommie Dearest, adapted from the account of the bizarre rering of Joan's four adopted children written by one of them, Christina Crawford. In Mommie Dearest, Dunaway's striking physical resemblance to Crawford at her most manic, with devouring eyes and savage slash of a mouth, make watching the movie a weirdly voyeuristic experience.
- Munich, 25 September:
 Hungarian director Istvan Szabo's Mephisto has opened here. When it reaches the U.S. and Britain, it should meet with the same acclaim it is now receiving. Apart from the fact that the screenplay, photography, direction and overall performances are of the highest order, the film offers Klaus Maria Brandauer (well-known in the theater here) a title role which invites a tour de force of acting, and gets it. English-speaking audiences are unfamiliar with Brandauer's gifts, his only foray in English being as a heavy in The Salzburg Connection (1972). Mephisto tells of a German actor, famous for his interpretation of Mephistopheles, who is a man of left-wing leanings hoping to establish a workers' theater. When the Nazis take power, his hunger for fame silences his conscience, leading him to betray colleagues and family. Szabo's chilling study of compromise is based on a novel by Klaus Mann, in turn drawn from the life of his uncle, actor Gustave Grundgens. In a gripping story of overweening ambition and creeping corruption, Brandauer's explosive and committed performance is unforgettable.
- Turkey, 1 October: Director Yilmaz Guney, imprisoned since 1972, has left Turkey. He made a secret exit from the country while out of jail on a pass.
 - New York, 8 October: There are few directors who could get away with filming 110 minutes of just two people having a conversation in a restaurant, but this is precisely what Louis Malle has achieved in his new American picture, My Dinner with André. Shown at the New York Film Festival, this unusual and absorbing film was written by the two protagonists, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, based on conversations they have had over the years. That it was acturally written needs to be stressed, because the natural manner in which the dinner companions chat gives the impression that the conversation is being improvised there and then before our eyes. Gregory, a tall, good-looking actor and director, seems initially more sure of himself, while Shawn, a bald and short actor and playwright, is more the uncertain listener. Gergory is the idealist, Shawn the realist. Malle's camera hovers around the table like a discreet maître d'hôtel eavesdropping on the fascinating conversation.
- Athens, 18 October: Melina Mercouri has been made Minister of Culture in Andréas Papandreou's socialist government.
- Hollywood, 24 October: Edith Head, Hollywood's most celebrated costume designer, has died. During her long career, she received 35 Oscar® nominations and won eight times. As couturère to such stars as Marlene Dietrich and Ingrid Bergman, her styles influenced fashion trends worldwide. She became well-known to the general public through her frequent TV and radio talk-show appearances and her syndicated newspaper column on women's fashion.
- Paris, 4 November: Bertrand Tavernier has transposed a novel by Jim Thompson set in the Deep South to West Africa in his latest film, Coup de torchon (Clean Slate). Philippe Noiret stars as the anti-hero, with Isabelle Huppert and Stéphane Audran. The film opens here today.
 - Paris, 11 November: Abel Gance, director of such legendary films as La Roue and Napoléon, has died. Gance was irresistibly drawn to the theater and left his job as a legal clerk to begin acting in 1908. He made his film debut in 1909, going on to form his own film company in 1911. His early films, however, met with little success. Gance's pacifist statement on the futility of war, J'accuse! (1918), influenced the work of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko.
- Lausanne, 15 November: Claude Autant-Lara has donated his film library and objects and documents from his films (costumes, photos, etc.) to Freddy Buache's Swiss Cinémathèque.
- New York, 20 November: Milos Forman has filmed Ragtime, based on the novel by E. L. Doctorow. James Cagney appears in his first film role in 20 years, along with Howard Rollins, Jr., Elizabeth McGovern, Mandy Patinkin, Mary Steenburgen and Brad Dourif.
- Hollywood, 30 November:
 After having had a drink in the salon of her yacht with her husband Robert Wagner and the actor Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood announced that she was going to bed. An hour later, worried when he found her cabin empty, Wanger searched the boat for his wife and found that the dinghy was missing. He sounded the alarm immediately. At 7:45 a.m., police found the body of Natalie Wood floating in the water beside the dinghy, about one and a half miles from the yacht. The tragic and mysterious death of the lovely 43-year-old star is ironic in that she had always expressed a fear of water. Shooting on her last film, Brainstorm, a science-fiction movie directed by Douglas Trumbull and co-starring Walken, was nearing its completion.
 - New York, 4 December: Since her childhood, Jane Fonda has reproached her father for neglecting her and her brother Peter. For his part, Henry Fonda found it difficult to accept his daughter's militancy vis-à-vis the Vietnam War, her position on abortion and her sympathy for the Black Panthers. Father and daughter remained distant for some time. As the years passed, and Jane saw her father enter old age, she wanted to get closer to him. Therefore, she had been looking for some time for a screenplay that would allow them to act together. She finally found it in On Golden Pond, based on a play by Ernest Thompson. It concerns a crusty 80-year-old former college professor (Henry Fonda), returning with his wife (Katharine Hepburn) to their beloved lakeside vacation cabin in New England, where their daughter (Jane Fonda) -- on a rare visit -- brings her new boyfriend (Dabney Coleman) and his 13-year-old son (Doug McKeon) to stay. Always at odds with one another, father and daughter are reconciled in an embrace at the end. "The nature of the film made us think of time passing. My father and I were forced to seize the opportunity to get to know each other, and profit from the experience," Jane explained.
 - New York, 4 December: Director-star Warren Beatty has not chosen the most propitious of political times to make Reds. The story of John Reed, a brilliant journalist and founder-member of the American Communist Party, is not one calculated to catch the mood of Reagan's conservative America. Thirty years ago a project like this might have attracted the baleful attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Now Beatty has only to face the critics and the public, and the initial verdict is that he had overstretched himself. Reed had a remarkable if short-lived career, the high point of which was his chronicling of the Russian Revolution, which he witnessed, in Ten Days That Shook the World. But Beatty, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Briton Trevor Griffiths, has tried to combine the sweep of his colossal upheaval with the more intimate story of Reed's passion for writer Louise Bryant, portrayed by Diane Keaton. And here the movie degenerates into a bad case of Red-on-the-bed. Moreover, the presence in Reds of "witnesses" like Rebecca West and Henry Miller jars with the appearance of stars such as Jack Nicholson and Maureen Stapleton in cameo portraits of real people, in the aforementioned cases Eugene O'Neill and Emma Goldman, respectively. The one unmitigated joy of the film lies in the superb cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, who received an Academy Award for his work on Apocalypse Now. As producer, director, star and co-scenarist, Beatty seems to have bitten off more than he can chew, and the result is a sprawling, confused hymn to a kind of liberal idealism that remains deeply unfashionalbe in contemporary America.
- Budapest, 12 December: A comprehensive exhibition of the work of set designer Alexander Trauner is being held in the city where he was born. Trauner left Hungary in the late 1920s, and came to prominence with the French "poetic realism" movement of the 1930s.
- Paris, 16 December:
 Jean-Jacques Annaud's ambitious and highly original Quest for Fire (La Guerre du feu) is creating quite a stir. Freely adapted from a novel by J-H Rosny Aisné, an author of books set in prehistoric times, it tells the tale of the Ulam tribe, attempting to find the fire they have lost, and which they need in order to survive. During their quest, they encounter other tribes and must defend themselves. Set against beautifully shot landscapes that conjure up the Stone Age, the film's only dialogue is an invented language by Anthony Burgess. Financed partly by American and Canadian money and budgeted at nearly $12 million, the production, created for universal comprehension, seems perfectly suited for a worldwide market.
- Paris, 16 December: Otto Preminger's screen version of Carmen Jones (1954), based on the stage musical which, in turn, used Bizet's Carmen opera score, has at last been released in France. The composer's heirs have now agreed to its distribution here. The film stars Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte.
- Hollywood, 31 December: The average production cost for a feature film made by a major studio is estimated to be around $9.75 million. The highest budgets for this year were for Reds ($35 million) and Ragtime ($32 million).
- New York, 31 December: Sales of video recorders exceeded the million mark for the first time this year.
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20 February - Orange County, CA,