- New York, 4 January: The National Society of Film Critics Awards ceremony last night (Louis Malle's Atlantic City took three of the major awards) was notable for the way critics called on Polish authorities to release Andrzej Wajda "and all other Polish film directors, producers, screenwriters, actors and craftsmen who are currently being detained for their political beliefs and associations."
- Hollywood, 8 February: The filming of Brainstorm, which was interrupted last November by the death of its star, Natalie Wood, has started again. A new ending has been written for the film and Lloyd's of London have paid out $3 million so that the film can be completed.
- New York, 12 February:
 Costa-Gavras makes his Hollywood debut with Missing. The French-based filmmaker, a specialist in thrillers with a strong political angle, has turned his attention to the machinations of the CIA. Jack Lemmon plays a stiffbacked American patriot whose son disappears in mysterious circumstances in Chile in 1973. On his quest to find the truth he gradually begins to realize that he is in fact the dupe of U.S. Intelligence services. Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart's screenplay is based on the real-life experiences of Ed Horman and confirms the director's ability to make pointedly political films that are also exciting and commercially successful. Here he combines the plemical with the domestic as Lemmon is reconciled with his liberal daughter-in-law Sissy Spacek in a shared tragedy.
- New York, 18 February: Lee Strasberg, director, actor and drama teacher, died last night aged 81, just three days after his spirited chorus routine with former students Robert De Niro and Al Pacino at Radio City Music Hall's "Night of 100 Stars." Strasberg was born in Austria-Hungary, and came to the United States at the age of nine. He studied acting under Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya at the American Laboratory Theater, making his stage debut in 1925. He was among the founders in 1930 of the radical Group Theater in New York, for which he directed many plays. In 1948 Strasberg became the artistic director of the Actors Studio, where he influenced a new generation of performers, among them Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eli Wallach, Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger. They were among the stars who, in the 1950s, popularized The Method, a realistic approach to acting derived from the teachings of Stanislavsky. Strasberg made an auspicious screen debut in The Godfather Part II (1974), for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar®.
- Paris, 24 February: Former screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's first feature as director, Body Heat, opens here. A contemporary film noir with echoes of Double Indemnity, starring Kathleen Turner and William Hurt, it has made a substantial impression in America.
- Berlin, 25 February: A homegrown film, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Veronika Voss, has won the Golden Bear at the 32nd Film Festival here. The film, starring Rosel Zech as a has-been movie star, pays tribute to UFA.
- London, 26 February:
 Gangsters are on the loose in London in John Mackenzie's pulsating new thriller, The Long Good Friday. Chief among them is the burly little bullfrog figure of Bob Hoskins' East End mobster Harold Shand, anxious to clinch a "legitimate" deal with some money-men from the Mafia but dicovering that he has been targeted by the IRA, an outfit that doesn't play by the usual gangland rules. Shand gets even, but a nasty surprise is in store for him and his sultry mistress Helen Mirren at the end of the film. This is a break-through performance by Hoskins, an experienced character actor who first came to prominence on British TV as the tragic little Depression-era Everyman in Dennis Potter's brilliant serial "Pennies from Heaven."
 - Paris, 27 February: The evening of the presentation of the Césars was enlivened by the presence of Orson Welles, who had received the Legion of Honor from the president of France a few hours earlier. The great American actor-director witnessed the award for best film and best director going to Jean-Jacques Annaud's stone-age epic, Quest for Fire. Claude Miller's Garde à vue (The Inquisitor) gained the best screenplay, actor (Michel Serrault and supporting actor (Guy Marchand) prizes. This taut policier is confined almost entirely to the interrogation room inside a police station where the inquisitor (Lino Ventura) and the suspect (Serrault) arrested for child rape and murder, engage in an absorbing game of cat and mouse.
- Los Angeles, 4 March: Frank Capra was honored with the AFI's Life Achievement Award. Among the numerous stars of his films present for the occasion were James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis.
- New York, 19 March:
 Julie Andrews seems determined to dismantle her Goody-Two-Shoes image. Last year she bared her breasts in her director husband Blake Edwards' S.O.B.. Now, in his stylish comedy Victor/Victoria, she is cast as a temporary "transvestite." She's a singer on the skids who masquerades as a man and becomes the toast of the cabarets in 1930s Paris, to the delight of gay mentor Robert Preston and bewilderment of American suitor James Garner. Excellent support comes from Alex Karras and Lesley Ann Warren. The screenplay is based on a 1933 German film, Viktor und Viktoria.
 - Atlanta, 19 March: Columbia, the last of the majors from Hollywood's golden era to remain independent, has now been sold on the open market. The successful bidder is the Coca-Cola company, which is reported to have paid a cool $750 million for the prestigious film company.
- New York, 24 March: Release of the quirky black comedy, Eating Raoul, seen by some critics as the perfect marriage between mainstream moviemaking and the so-called "underground" cinema. Cult-film icons Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel (both of whom directed) play a married couple who decide to cash in on the sexual perversions of others. Posing as a hooker, Woronov lures the "johns" in and indulges their every kinky whim, whereupon Bartel kills the unwary client, steals the valuables, and sells the corpse for dog food. Though they see nothing wrong in what they're doing, they react in prudish disgust at the sexual preferences of their victims. Eventually, Raoul (Robert Beltran), the fellow who transports the corpses to the dog food concern, proves expendable -- and extremely edible. Eating Raoul features a high-powered comic supporting cast, among them Buck Henry, Ed Begley Jr., Richard Paul, Hamilton Camp, and Edie McClurg. -- Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
 - Los Angeles, 29 March:
 On receiving his Best Screenplay Oscar® for Chariots of Fire, Colin Welland, echoing Paul Revere's warning cry to Americans of the Redcoats' advance, exclaimed, "The British are coming!" This British film, which also took Best Picture, Best Original Score and Costume Design awards, originated from producer David Puttnam, inspired by a history of the Olympic Games. It was the 1924 event that caught his attention, because of the different motivations of two of Britain's gold medalists -- runners Harold Abrahams, who ran for his country to overcome the anti-Semitism of which he was conscious, and Eric Liddell, a Scots missionary, who ran for the greater glory of God, but never on a Sunday. The contrasts and similarities between the Jew and the Scot are well delineated in the performences of Ben Cross and Ian Charleson respectively. It is a classic English tale, told in classic English terms, with a certain nostalgia for Empire, which ends with director Hugh Hudson pulling out all the stops for the final sporting triumph. Running has never looked more exhilarating.
 Hudson lost out as Best Director to Warren Beatty for his Russian Revolution epic, Reds. The Best Actor and Actress Oscars® were awarded to the two veteran stars of On Golden Pond, Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, moving and amusing as a loving couple having to face the onset of old age.
- Hollywood, 31 March: Carolco, the financing and foreign sales organization, has sold its first in-house production, First Blood, almost worldwide. The film, not as yet complete, has survived injuries to star Sylvester Stallone, the exit of Kirk Douglas over script disagreements, and the harsh Canadian weather. Carolco's partners blame the inflated $15 million budget on these mishaps.
- Santa Fe, 27 April: Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi stunned audiences last night at its Santa Fe Film Festival world premiere. The film, seven years in the making and shot in 14 states, features a minimalist musical score by Philip Glass. The title is a Hopi Indian expression meaning "life out of balance."
- Hollywood, 3 May: The ambitious plans of producer, director and would-be mogul Francis Ford Coppola for his Zoetrope studio have collapsed in a heap. Despite a well publicized and spectacular launch of his extravagant musical romance, starring Nastassja Kinski, One from the Heart, at Radio City Music Hall earlier this year, the film has flopped. Since it ended up costing about $26 million, twice the original budget, this means that Coppola is now deeply in debt and unlikely to be able to find the funds to save his studio which is currently up for sale.
 - Paris, 12 May: Almost 10 years since his first film, Les Hommes, Daniel Vigne has finally delivered his second, an intriguing medieval mystery, Le Retour de Martin Guerre (The Return of Martin Guerre). Given the director's scrupulous attention to every detail of the period, it is not surprising the project took him so long to realize. Gérard Depardieu, playing with controlled power, is a man who comes to a 16th-century French village claiming to be Martin Guerre, a youth who left his child-bride pregnant eight years earlier. The question that has to be established is whether he is an imposter. The court case contains as much suspense as any modern drama.
- Baltimore, 14 May:
 Diner is a touching and funny portrait of a group of guys moving awkwardly out of their teens as the 1960s are about to dawn. First-time director Barry Levinson has conjured up his own memories of hanging out with the gang at the eating place of the title in his native Baltimore. Each of the characters, played brilliantly by relative newcomers, has a different problem to resolve. Daniel Stern, the only married man, finds he has nothing much to say to his wife, Ellen Barkin; Steve Guttenberg is afraid that the same thing will happen to him; Kevin Bacon is a dropout who drinks too much, and Mickey Rourke is under pressure to settle a gambling debt. All in all, it's a beguiling debut for a very talented writer and director.
- New York, 21 May: Release of Annie, John Huston's film version of the Broadway musical comedy inspired by Harold Gray's cartoon strip.
 - Cannes, 26 May: Because of the exceptional quality of this year's Festival entries, the jury, presided over by Italian stage director Giorgio Strehler, created a special award, the 35th Festival prize, as was done exactly 10 years ago for Cannes' 25th birthday. It was presented to Michelangelo Antonioni's film Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman), his first in seven years, during which time he had been experimenting with video techniques. The great Italian director has returned here to familiar territory -- the void at the heart of a relationship, and the difficulty of loving someone fully in our times. The joint winners of the Golden Palm were both powerful denunciations of repressive regimes. Missing, Costa-Gavras' first American film, follows the tortuous quest of a father (Jack Lemmon, voted best actor) for his son who has been arrested by the military junta in Chile. The film chillingly captures the atmosphere of a police state, and the political message is unequivocal. Yol is even more remarkable in that it was shot in Turkey by Serif Gören from a detailed script written by Yilmaz Guney when he was in jail. The negative was smuggled out to Europe where Guney, following his escape from prison last year, edited it. Yol, "the road to life" being the nearest translation, follows the lives of five prisoners on a week's parole to all corners of the country. It is acted with exceptional conviction, against vividly realized landscapes. And political repression, the 1956 Hungarian uprising, also forms the background to Károly Makk's Egymásra nézve (Another Way), featuring two brilliant actresses, one of whom (Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak) won the award. The Special Jury Prize went to a less contemporary but no less effective film. This was La Notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars) by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, which retells the events of August 1944 when a Tuscan town was threatened with destruction by the Nazis as the Americans advanced. It is full of bravura and inspiring sequences, as was the bizarre epic Fitzcarraldo, for which Werner Herzog won the best director award.
- Paris, 29 May: Romy Schneider has been found dead from a heart attack, brought about by an excess of alcohol and pills. Since the tragic death of her son David last July, Schneider declared that she felt she was living on a sinking ship. "My life is over," she told the German magazine Stern. Nevertheless, she finished shooting a film dedicated to "David and his Father," and was hoping to return to the stage. Hounded by the tabloid press, she was forced to change her address several times before settling into an apartment with her new boyfriend Laurent Pétin. At 7:30 this morning, he found her dead on the sofa, a pen in her hand and an unfinished letter by her side.
- New York, 9 June: Steven Spielberg, an avid collector of cinema objects, has purchased "Rosebud," the child's sled belonging to Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) in Citizen Kane, for $60,500.
- Munich, 10 June: Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been found dead in his Munich apartment at the age of 37, just as he was completing the cutting of his last film, Querelle. The cause of death was reported to be heart failure due to a mixture of sleeping pills and cocaine. Almost a one-man film industry, he made over 30 films in 12 years. It is a surprisingly consistent, entertaining and probing body of work. He began directing in 1969, rapidly becoming part of the new generation of directors who put German cinema on the map again after 30 years, his work revealing a heartless, avaricious, materialistic New Germany. Most of his characters are frustrated by the barrenness of urban existence, sometimes turning to violence. Although he was homosexual, women, usually played by Ingrid Caven, Hanna Schygulla or Barbara Sukowa, were at the center of his films. The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Veronika Voss (1979) and Lola (1981) show them trying to survive in an ironically evoked postwar Germany.
- New York, 13 June:
 Variety has already called Steven Spielberg's latest picture, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, "the best Disney film never made," and the movie is, indeed, a remarkable celebration of the childhood innocence dear to Walt Disney's heart. A fatherless 10-year-old boy, played by Henry Thomas, befriends a creature from another planet who has been stranded on Earth. Much of the movie is shot from hip height, the point of view of small children, and in the process the charming little alien (magnificently created by Carlo Rambaldi) becomes the secret companion of all our childhoods as Spielberg moves from terror through comedy and death to the exhilaration of the children's climactic magic BMX bike ride. This is Spielberg's most personal film to date, and it is all the more powerful for being filtered through his instinctive grasp of the power of myth. Smallness never diminishes anything in a Spielberg film, not least the small protagonists in E. T.
 - Los Angeles, 25 June: After 1979's Alien, Ridley Scott has stayed in the world of science fiction with Blade Runner, adapted from the Philip K. Dick classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? An android might be programmed with sufficiently sophisticated human responses to convince him that he is, indeed human. This possibility hovers in the background of Blade Runner, in which Harrison Ford plays the hardboiled bounty hunter on the track of a band of semi-human robot replicants in the trash-littered, steam-shrouded, perpetually rained-on streets of Los Angeles' Chinatown in 2019. The replicants combine instinctive animal grace with balletically explosive violence directed against their human creators. Fighting to stay the hand of the executioner that is programmed into their bodies, these deadly creatures engage our sympathy more than their sub-Bogartian pursuer who, ironically, might himself be a highly specialized android. With superb production design by Lawrence G. Paull, special effects by Douglas Trumbull, an electonic music track by Vangelis and an arresting performance by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer in the role of the blond and piercingly blue-eyed chief android, Blade Runner brilliantly combines the conventions of the private eye genre with a bleak vision of a 21st-century future. It's a world in which, as the film's publicity tells us, "no one gets out of this alive."
- Hollywood, 30 June: Shooting starts today on Psycho II, to be directed by Anthony Perkins who will also reprise his role as the proprietor of the Bates Motel. Vera Miles, who was in the 1960 original, appears again.
- Los Angeles, 8 July: Over 1,000 people are expected to turn out tonight at the Variety Arts Theater for the 6th Annual Erotic Film Awards. According to industry spokesman Dave Friedman, during 1981 over a million X-rated videocassettes were sold in the U.S.
- Hollywood, 13 July: After 16 weeks of national release Porky's has become only the 27th film to top the $100 million mark.
- Hollywood, 28 July:
 Richard Gere has exchanged the designer suits he wore in American Gigolo for the crisp white uniform of An Officer and a Gentleman. He is the misfit in the middle of a grueling course at the Naval Officer Candidate School, who is challenged by tough black drill sergeant Louis Gossett Jr. to prove whether he's "a steer or a queer." Fortunately Debra Winger is on hand to put the issue beyond doubt in a romance that, in spite of swear words and steamy sex scenes, follows a tried and trusted Hollywood formula.
- Los Angeles, 12 August: The much loved stage and movie actor, Henry Fonda, has died after several months of illness. Fonda rose to international stardom in the mid-1930s and throughout his acting career was appreciated by the public and profession alike. He got the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1978 and won his only Oscar® for On Golden Pond earlier this year.
- Los Angeles, 16 August: Rouben Mamoulian was honored last night as the 13th recipient of the Directors Guild of America D. W. Griffith Award for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to motion pictures. On this occasion of the Golden Jubilee of his 1932 film, Love Me Tonight, the audience was treated to clips from many of his works, including Queen Christina.
 - New York, 21 August: George Miller's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior goes one better than the original. It's a post-holocaust Western in which embittered ex-cop Mel Gibson rides to the rescue of civilization's last representatives, who are besieged in a desert fortress by an army of freaks under the command of a giant called the Humungus. Directed at a frantic pace and exploding with stylized violence, Mad Max 2 stays just on the right side of parody.
- London, 29 August: Ingrid Bergman has died. Her last film was Ingmar Bergman's Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata) in 1978.
- Monacoville, 14 September: Princess Grace of Monaco was killed in a tragic car accident today. The former actress Grace Kelly gave up her star status to marry Prince Ranier of Monaco in 1956.
- Hollywood, 6 October: Fines totalling $62,375 were levied against five people or companies for 45 safety code violations in connection with the Twilight Zone helicopter tragedy last July. John Landis and his company Levitsky Prods. were fined $30,955 and Western Helicopter Inc. $20,965.
- Tunis, 30 October: The major prize at the ninth cinema festival here has been awarded to the Malian film Finyé (The Wind), directed by Souleymane Cissé.
- Los Angeles, 1 November: King Vidor has died at the age of 88. Vidor began directing with a two-reeler on car-racing, The Tow, in 1914, and made his final film (another short, The Metaphor) 66 years later in 1980. This makes his the longest directorial career on record.
 - London, 2 November: A new commercial television channel, Channel Four, dedicated to transmitting quality programs and catering to special interests, goes on the air today.
- Los Angeles, 30 November: After her period as political activist, Jane Fonda has taken up a less radical cause: the body beautiful. The star's fitness book, My Method, has already sold 700,000 copies in the U.S. and is now being published in Europe.
- London, 3 December:
 A project that Richard Attenborough has been nurturing for 20 years has finally come to fruition. Gandhi, a sweeping account of the life and times of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the saintly, pacifist father of modern India, is epic filmmaking in the grand tradition. Attenborough (Young Winston, 1972, and A Bridge Too Far, 1977) certainly has the pedigree as a director, having a grasp of storyline, an ease at chronicling the lives of great men and a mastery of logistics. All were required in the making of Gandhi, which, for the production company Goldcrest, carried a price tag of some $20 million. At the center of the film is Ben Kingsley's riveting performance as Gandhi. Kingsley is an Anglo-Indian, born Krishna Banji in 1944 in Northampton, England, but Gandhi took him to India for the first time. Preparing for the role, he ensured that he gave his performance an extra dimension by immersing himself in Gandhi's way of life, sitting cross-legged on a mat, following his diet and practicing yoga.
 - Los Angeles, 8 December: Black comedian Eddie Murphy, a veteran of TV's "Saturday Night Live," has made an explosive debut in Walter Hill's fast and furious action comedy 48 HRS. Murphy is the sassy con sprung by hulking cop Nick Nolte for the hours in question to help him track down Murphy's homicidal partner. At first the two men heartily loathe each other but, as is the way in Hollywood, they take their final leave of each other after some heavy-duty male bonding. Murphy is superb, mocking Nolte's taste in clothes and cars, punctuating the picture with his trademark cackle, chasing every skirt in sight and terrorizing the patrons of a redneck bar.
- New York, 8 December:
 Sidney Lumet's new film should impress the critics and please the public, but is not likely to find favor with the New England legal establishment. In The Verdict, Paul Newman plays an attorney on the skids, spending his time at the wrong kind of bar in the absence of clients. Out of the blue, he is approached to take on a malpractice case involving a Boston hospitals board that appears impossible to win. Accepting the challenge, he gets involved with sexy Charlotte Rampling and viperous James Mason (the opposing counsel) along the way and, needless to say, finds redemption. Lumet's picture is a gripping thriller-cum-courtroom drama with a moral message and Newman in top form.
 - Paris, 5 October: Meryl Streep has focused her great technical gifts on Sophie's Choice, written and directed by Alan J. Pakula, in which she plays the Nazi death camp survivor of the title, haunted by her harrowing past in postwar Brooklyn. Her Polish accent is perfect, but her remarkable characterization cannot carry the weight of a film that founders on the premise of the title (the decision whether or not to surrender her child) which introduces an element of the meretricious to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Ironically, Streep struck just the right kind of note as a young Aryan German woman trying to save her husband in "Holocaust," a 1978 television mini-series whose populist ambitions were not suffocated by the portentiousness that clings to Sophie's Choice. Streep is never less than compelling in the flashbacks that take us back to Auschwitz, but Pakula's screenplay, adapted from the novel by William Styron and the first he has written for a film, can only grope at the real horror of those times. Filmmakers have yet to find a way of directly confronting the experience of the camps.
- Los Angeles, 17 December:
 At Mann's Chinese Theater last night, in the presence of a starry audience that included Christopher Reeve, Barbra Streisand, Michael Douglas and Tina Turner, the long-awaited comedy from Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie, was unveiled to loud laughter and applause. By now everyone knows that it involves Hoffman's playing a woman. In fact, he delivers a brilliantly deft comic double -- self-mocking as Michael Dorsey, a pretentious, out-of-work avant-garde actor, and instantly likeable as Dorothy Michaels, whose persona he takes on in order to get an acting job in a TV "soap." It is arguably the most convincing drag portrayal in cinema history. With her large round spectacles, tailored suits, flashing smile, and soothing Southern accent (with just the right amount of prissiness), Dorothy is a wonderful creation. Hoffman gets excellent support from the rest of the cast: Jessica Lange, as his best girlfriend and secret love interest; Charles Durning as Lange's dad, who falls for Dorothy and proposes marriage; Sydney Pollack (who also directed), as Michael's uncomprehending agent; and Dabney Coleman, as Dorothy's male chauvinist director.
 - Stockholm, 25 December: Often in the past, Ingmar Bergman has suffered from the incomprehension and even ingratitude of his country. However, he has offered Swedish audiences a wonderful Christmas present in Fanny & Alexander, which the director has announced as his last film for the big screen. It opens with the wealthy, loving and ebulent Ekdahl family gathered to celebrate Christmas. When the actor-father of 10-year-old Alexander and eight-year-old Fanny dies, their mother marries the city's bishop, a strict disciplinarian, who runs an extremely ascetic household. His cruely to his two stepchildren leads Grandmother Ekdahl's Jewish friend and lover to rescue them. Happiness and balance are restored as new babies are born, and the family gathers once more to celebrate. Bergman's most optimistic film creates pure enchantment as romance, tragedy, comedy, realism and fantasy blend into a perfect evocation of childhood, the place and the period (turn-of-the-century Sweden), caught in glowing images by the ravishing color camerwork of Sven Nykvist. The wonderful cast includes three of Bergman's regulars: Gunnar Björnstrand, Erland Josephson and Harriet Andersson. Bergman has claimed the influence of two writers on the film -- the storyteller E. T. A. Hoffman and Charles Dickens. If his is true to his word, then this final film is a superlative culmination of his 37 years as one of cinema's greatest artists.
- Hollywood, 31 December: During the year the major studios have produced only 50 films in the U.S., while the number of films made abroad was up 75 percent from 1981.
|
24 July - Winnepeg, Manitoba, Canada, 
