- Acapulco, 20 January: Johnny Weissmuller has died at the age of 79, after suffering severe congestion of the lungs. It was an ironic end for the multiple Olympic champion, who found even greater fame as a screen Tarzan. Weissmuller made his debut in 1932 as Tarzan the Ape Man and continued in the role for 11 more films until 1948, bowing out with Tarzan and the Mermaids.
- New York, 27 January:
 Although Broadway Danny Rose might be considered one of Woody Allen's more minor movies, it is a thoroughly charming and often extremely amusing Runyonesque moral fable. Allen himself plays the small-time showbiz agent of the title, a nebbish whose problem is that as soon as one of his clients actually makes it, they drop him in favor of a big-name agent. Danny, stuck with a washed-up Italian crooner who is attempting a comeback, unwittingly gets involved with the singer's girlfriend (Mia Farrow). The film is not only funny about the showbiz small-time, but is also touchingly nostalgic. Farrow is brilliantly cast against type as a vulgar blonde bimbo.
 - Paris, 27 January: The Louis Delluc Prize this year has been awarded to À nos amours (To Our Loves), Maurice Pialat's first film since Loulou four years ago. The director had wanted to shoot the Arlette Langmann screenplay since 1976, but he could not get it financed, nor could he find the right female lead. But with 16-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire, making her very first screen appearance, it was worth the wait. Bonnaire brings vitality and intensity to the role of the young girl who, unable to feel love, becomes increasingly promiscuous in her search for it. The film is a painful and perceptive study of the gulf between romantic yearnings and the ability to realize them.
- New York, 31 January: American film critics have voted Gérard Depardieu best foreign actor of 1983 for his performances as Danton (in Wajda's Danton) and in the title role of Daniel Vigne's La Retour de Martin Guerre.
- Hollywood, 10 February:
 Zoetrope Studios have been taken over by Canadian financier Jack Singer, whose involvement with producer-director Francis Ford Coppola has come to an acrimonious end. However, as Coppola pointed out when the crisis began to develop, "It's important to remember that Zoetrope Company, as opposed to Zoetrope Studios, has been alive for 13 years now, and if we sell the studio it has nothing to do with our company and all our assets." Thus, despite the unexpected box-office failure of his innovative musical One from the Heart in 1982, he has already produced and directed two more movies, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both adapted from novels by S. E. Hinton, and is finishing a third, The Cotton Club. A lavish drama with music, set in 1930s Harlem, it is co-produced with the ex-Paramount boss Robert Evans, producer of the Godfather films with Coppola 10 years ago.
- Hollywood, 20 February:
 Disney has announced the creation of a new production company, Touchstone Pictures, to make films aimed at adult audiences.
 - Paris, 22 February: Among the many directors who have dreamt of bringing Marcel Proust's masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) to the screen have been Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey. Harold Pinter, in fact, wrote a scenario for Losey. But they were all defeated by the problems of reducing this monumental work down to the proportions of film. German director Volker Schlöndorff, who has previously adapted works by Robert Musil and Günter Grass to the screen, has not been intimidated by the prospect. He has tackled only the first volume of the novel Swann's Way, and even then the action has been reduced in the screenplay by Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière to only twenty-four hours. Un amour de Swann (Swann in Love) concentrates on the passion that Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons) has for the beautiful demimondaine Odette de Crecy (Ornella Muti), over whom he is racked with insane jealousy. It also touches on the snobbery of the aristocratic circles in which Swann, a Jew, moves. The film is elegant, refined and well-played -- especially, and surprisingly, by Alain Delon as the decadent Baron de Charlus. Sven Nykvist's camera has exquisitely caught the atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Paris, and Hans Werner Henze has created appropriate music. Nevertheless, Schlöndorff's film cannot begin to approach the richness of Proust's novel, and Proustians will find the elimination of the narrator only one essential dimension missing. Those who have not read Proust are likely to be more responsive.
- Berlin, 26 February: Maximilian Schell presented his new work, a documentary titled Marlene, at the 34th International Film Festival. The film, which is based on 17 hours of interviews with Marlene Dietrich, who never appears on the screen, features only the actress' voice, evoking her life and career.
- Berlin, 28 February: The Golden Bear has been awarded to Love Streams, made by American director John Cassavetes.
- Los Angeles, 13 March: Walt Disney Pictures chose the right film, Splash, to launch Touchstone Pictures. The Ron Howard movie did just that over the weekend, marking the best ever weekend box-office results with an impressive $6.174 million in its first three days.
- Paris, 14 March:
 After the success of Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni (1979), Daniel Toscan du Plantier, the head of Gaumont, decided to produce Bizet's Carmen, the most popular of all operas, and his choice of director was the Italian Francisco Rosi. In fact, this is the fourth, and only straightforward, version of the work in the space of seven months. Last August, Carlos Saura directed a flamenco-inspired ballet film which featured the dancer Antonio Gades. Three months later, three films were made (with different casts) of Peter Brook's pared down Carmen, which he staged at his theater, the Bouffes du Nord. Then in January Jean-Luc Godard's singular Prenom Carmen (First Name Carmen) was released, and we can soon expect Naked Carmen, a soft porn adaptation by Albert Lopez. Meanwhile, there is Rosi's attractive, intelligent and entertaining film. The director opted for realism, shooting on location in Andalusia, which brings authenticity to Meilhac and Halévy's libretto. The opening sequence, using slow-motion in the bullring, followed by a dramatic Corpus Christi procession, sets the tone for the events to come, rooting them firmly in the dark mystique of Spanish ritual. Julia Migenes-Johnson delivers a smolderingly sexy Carmen, Placido Domingo is convincing as her victim, and Ruggero Raimondi is an imposing Escamillo. The orchestra is conducted by Loren Maazel.
- Hollywood, 19 March: James Cameron has begun shooting his latest film, The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton.
- Paris, 24 March: The president of Walt Disney Productions, Michael Eisner, has signed a contract with the French prime minister, Laurent Fabius, for the construction of a European Disneyland. The new park is to be built in Marne-la-Vallée, just outside Paris, and is planned to open early in 1990.
- New York, 30 March:
 The greatest screen Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, died two months ago. Now there's a new $33 million version of the evergreen Edgar Rice Burroughs potboiler, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, a title longer than the dialogue that carried Weissmuller through most of his jungle epics. The new Tarzan, French-American actor Christopher Lambert, is more talkative, reunited with civilization as the aristocratic English heir to Ralph Richardson. Lambert's leading lady, the former model Andie MacDowell, remains speechless; her Southern drawl is dubbed by Glenn Close.
 - Hollywood, 30 March: With its combination of rousing "Raiders of the Lost Ark"-style action thrills and delicious romantic hokum, Romancing the Stone is a surefire bet to charm audiences. Kathleen Turner is wonderfully likeable as a wistful writer of romance novels, propelled into her own madcap high adventure in the jungles of Colombia with sexy, caddish mercenary Michael Douglas. Danny DeVito, their disaster-prone pursuer in the quest for a priceless diamond, adds to the exuberant fun, pacily directed by Robert Zemeckis. A Turner-Douglas partnership may become a trademark of for the mid-80s.
- Los Angeles, 9 April:
 "There has been a lot said about the studios that turned it down, but I think it's more significant that a Hollywood studio [Paramount] did make it," said James L. Brooks, the director of Terms of Endearment, the winner of five Oscars®, including Best Picture. Brooks took Best Director and Best Screenplay Adaptation for thie astutely written, eccentric family comedy-drama. But the film belongs to the actors, headed by Shirley MacLaine's striking Oscar®-winning performance as Aurora Greenway, a middle-aged widow, all frills, flounces and hairpieces, who is forced to come to terms with the revelation that her daughter has terminal cancer. Jack Nicholson (Best Supporting Actor) gives a bravura performance as her crude, licentious and finally caring neighbor and lover. The Best Actor winner Robert Duvall was superb as Max Sledge, an over-the-hill country-and-western singer in Tender Mercies. And Linda Hunt became the first performer to win an Oscar® for portraying a person of the opposite sex as she took home the Best Supporting Actress award for her work as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously.
 - New York, 2 May: Parviz Sayyad, a popular comic director in Iran before the revolution, had to leave his homeland and wound up in America with no funds to pursue his cinematic art. Somehow he scraped together the shoestring to get this one filmed, co-financed by German and American money. Ferestadeh (Der Auftrag or The Mission) is a brilliant, compelling examination of what it means to follow your ideals, after you find out that everything you thought was wrong. The film concerms a young Iranian who arrives in New York. He is a quiet, serious, pious Muslim. His orders: find the ex-SAVAK officer and kill him. While trailing the officer in New York's subway, he accidentally meets him face to face while helping him escape muggers. From his pocket falls the Koran with Persian translation. The officer picks it up and sees the Persian writing, and they become friends. The pious young Muslim assassin finds out that the ex-SAVAK officer is a nice guy, has two cute kids, and they love their new uncle from Iran (the assassin). How he can find it in his heart to kill this man? He wanted to serve Islam, but he is forced to confront the question of where is real Islam -- in the revolution? Or in his heart? This movie is made with heart and sympathy, about discovering moral ambiguity in one's own soul. An excellent view of the spiritual problems with the Iranian revolution made by an expatriate with no resources but his wit and his heart. -- Abu Ahzan, IMDb
- Copenhagen, 14 May: Opening of Lars von Trier's Forbrydelsens Element (Element of Crime), with British actors Esmond Knight and Michael Elphick. A police inquiry gives way to madness.
- Cannes, 15 May: During the Festival here, Richard Attenborough unveiled a $4.5 million project bannered "A British Film Year." The aim of the project, which is backed by all sectors of the British film industry, is twofold -- to revitalize movie attendance at home and to increase awareness of British talent abroad through major exhibitions of British films worldwide.
- France, 17 May: According to figures published by the National Center for Cinema, attendance for 1983 was down 5.4 percent from the previous year. However, there was an increase in the number of French productions.
- Antibes, 20 May: At the Eden-Roc Hotel, far from the hustle and bustle of the Cannes Film Festival, a significant meeting has been taking place between Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture, and Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), the organization that represents the interests of the American film industry. They have reached agreement on a number of important issues, including the protection of French production from American competition, the need to combat video piracy, and the promotion of cinema showings of films ahead of any subsequent TV or video release.
 - Cannes, 25 May:
 It is extremely rare for a Golden Palm winner at the Cannes Film Festival to be greeted with such unanimous approval as was Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. This project represents the culmination of themes that have run through much of the German director's work over the years. He has always been more aware than most of his fellow German directors of the cultural influence of America on Germany. Wenders has already made a number of road movies set in Germany, so it was only natural that he should finally make one in America. In many ways, Paris, Texas is archetypal. A man (Harry Dean Stanton), lost in an empty landscape and speechless during the first 20 minutes, is shell-shocked by the separation from his wife (Nastassja Kinski) and wants to become a real father to his seven-year-old son. The extraordinary, calm intensity of Stanton's performance, the brillian color photography from Robert Müller (Wenders' regular cameraman) and Ry Cooder's haunting music, give the film the mythic dimension of a Western. The jury gave their Special Prize to Napló gyermekeimnek (Diary for My Children), directed by the Hungarian Márta Mészáros, in which she draws on her own painful memories of the 1950s Stalinist period. Bertrand Tavernier collected the best director award for Un dimanche à la campagne (Sunday in the Country), a stylish, charming and nostalgic period piece (set in 1912) of a pastoral family outing.
 - New York, 1 June: It is 1920 and a band of adolescent Jewish thieves roam New York City's Lower East Side. The years pass and, thanks to Prohibition, the small petty thieves become grown-up mobsters. Two of them, Noodles and Max, meet in their childhood haunts in 1968 to reminisce about the past. Sergio Leone's long, fascinating homage to the gangster movie, Once Upon a Time in America, has been shorn of 88 of its original 277 minutes running time, to the disgust of the director, who has disowned the picture. For 13 years, Leone has been working on this project, the evolution of gangster culture among the ethnic minorities which made up the American melting pot. In spite of the mutilation inflicted on the film, which renders chuncks of the storyline virtually incomprehensible, Once Upon a Time in America remains a remarkably imaginative work, with outstanding central performances from the intense, explosive James Woods and Robert De Niro, in whom Leone has rekindled the passion that blazed in Raging Bull. Once Upon a Time in America is a fitting sequel to Leone's 1969 Once Upon a Time in the West.
- New York, 8 June:
 Joe Dante's Gremlins is a gleeful inversion of E.T. and a typically subversive dig at the film's sponsor, Steven Spielberg. Inventor Hoyt Axton's Christmas present to his son Zach Galligan is a Mogwai, a cuddly little creature he has picked up in a Chinese curio shop. However, when Gizmo, as the Mogwai is called, gets wet, he produces a number of decidedly less friendly creatures who go on the rampage in a gloriously anarchic display of unrestrained, childlike malice. In the process they trash a Capraesque small town as Dante affectionately thumbs his nose at It's a Wonderful Life. Also caught by Dante's scattergun are Walt Disney, the YMCA, Phil Spector's Christmas Album and Santa Claus. A graduate of the Roger Corman Z-movie academy, the inventive Dante gives Gremlins his customary trademark, a cameo by B-movie icon Dick Miller.
- Hollywood, 8 June: The Screen Actors Guild has a new member: Donald Duck. To fete the famous fowl's 50th birthday, Ralph Bell (SAG's vice president) and Tap Dance Kid stars Alfonso Ribiero and Martine Allard presented the Disney Duck with an honorary SAG membership card at a birthday brunch in the Rockefeller Plaza.
 - New York, 8 June: The spirit of the old Bob Hope horror-comedy vehicles, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers, is alive and well in Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters. Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Bill Murray play redundant parapsychologists who form a team dedicated to dealing with spooks. Their highly specialized skills are soon required to eliminate the threat posed by a New York skyscraper, built by the worshippers of an ancient god, which is acting as a gateway to the spirit world. Crammed with sardonic one-liners and exploding with up-to-the-minute special effects, which absorbed a large part of the picture's $32 million budget, Ghostbusters looks like this summer's box-office sensation. But it's a shame that Sigourney Weaver, looking slightly uneasy in comedy, is relegated to the role of love interest for wacky Bill Murray.
- London, 22 June: One of the cinema's most intriguing directors, Joseph Losey, has died. He was blacklisted in 1951 and worked in England under pseudonyms for several years. Considered in France as one of the great auteurs of the cinema, Losey's work has at times been shunned by the public at large here and in the U.S.
 - Los Angeles, 27 June: The MPAA has introduced a new rating for films, PG-13, which indicates parental guidance is recommended for children under 13. Releases that will fall into this new category this year include Dune, The Flamingo Kid, Garbo Talks, Johnny Dangerously, Mrs. Soffel, The Razor's Edge, Red Dawn, The River and The Woman in Red -- films that don't require a "mature" audience, but which contain language or themes of which parents should be aware for their younger children.
- New York, 27 June:
 Films from the Netherlands have rarely made an impact on the art cinema circuit in the U.S., but Paul Verhoeven's splendidly overwrought De vierte man (The Fourth Man) seems to have broken through the barrier. Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbé) is a heavy drinking writer living in Amsterdam with his twerpy, much younger, violinist boyfriend. Gerard becomes obsessed with a good looking straight guy at a railway station while en route to a seaside town to give a lecture to a local writing association. There, he encounters the mysterious Christine Halslag (Renée Soutendijk), the association treasurer who dresses in blood red or nothing at all, and who rarely steps out from behind her ever-whirring film camera. Gerard spends the night with an insatiable Christine, and in the morning is completely stunned to find out that sheÕs dating Herman (Thom Hoffman), the stud from the railway station. Much drama, most of it surreal, ensues when Christine summons Herman to meet a salivating Gerard. Obviously, the movie's mixture of homo-erotic imagery, black humor, Christian guilt and High Gothic camp appeals to sophisticated Manhattan audiences.
- Paris, 12 August: Parisians can now see Fritz Lang's great German classic Metropolis, (1926) put to music and colored by Giorgio Moroder. Protesting film-lovers see it as a perversion of the filmmaker's art.
- Paris, 14 September: Crowds of cinema-lovers as well as Kurds attended the funeral of the exiled director Yilmaz Güney at Père-Lachaise cemetery. He died of cancer on 9 September.
 - New York, 19 September: Milos Forman returned to his hometown of Prague to shoot most of his new film Amadeus. It is a sumptuous adaptation from the Peter Shaffer play about the rivalry between Wolgang Amadeus Mozart, the musical genius but vulgar, childish buffoon, and Antonio Salieri, the pompous and dignified but far less talented court composer. Salieri is eaten up by his jealousy of the prodigy's God-given abilities -- compounded by his distaste for the man -- and when he can stand it no longer he dresses up like an avenging angel in black mask and cape and gives Mozart a commission that he knows will kill him. Tom Hulce, in the title role, gives a manic bravura performance, lending the character a high-pitched giggle. A magnificent moment comes when the dying Mozart speaks of his gratitude and admiration for the man who is killing him, and of his fear that Salieri disliked him. As Salieri, F. Murray Abraham is impressive, managing to reveal an intelligence behind the malevolence, and making the crazed figure into a tragic and sympathetic one. He is especially moving when he first gazes at Mozart's sketches for the Requiem. "Here was the very voice of God," he proclaims with a mixture of admiration and envy.
- Hollywood, 21 September: In Steve Martin's fouth collaboration with Carl Reiner, All of Me, Martin plays an idealistic lawyer, half of whose body is possessed by the spirit of Lily Tomlin's dead an unpleasantly crochety millionairess. It's an uneven effort, but Martin provides a feast of physical comedy as he simultaneously walks and talks as half-man, half-woman.
- Hollywood, 1 October: Barry Diller has resigned as president of Paramount to take over from Alan Hirschfield as president of 20th Century-Fox. Diller had been head of the studio for 10 years.
- Paris, 24 October:
 François Truffaut, who died three days ago from a brain tumor, was buried today at the Montmartre cemetery after being cremated. The director knew the nature of his illness, but he refused to recognize its gravity. In August of last year, while he was working on the scenario of La Petite voleuse, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and had to undergo a serious operation. Since then, he had been unable to complete work on what would have been his 23rd feature film. Gérard Depardieu, while shooting Fort Saganne, visited Truffaut almost every day to discuss future joint projects. Truffaut was also planning to direct a new adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo for American television. Death, alas, prevented these plans from coming to fruition. Truffaut's last appearance in public was on "Apostrophes," a popular television book program, on which he discussed the definitive edition of his famous interviews with his idol Alfred Hitchcock. Truffaut once said that he wanted to film tender stories like Hitchock and thrillers like Jean Renoir. "Are films more important than life?" asks Jean-Pierre Léaud in La Nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1973). For Truffaut, one of the first New Wave directors, the answer was in the affirmative. The entusiasm he felt for filmmaking communicated itself in that movie, and in a career in which he demonstrated a wide range of styles and treated a variety of subjects with immediacy, freshness, lucidity and freedom of expression.
- New York, 25 October: Jim Jarmusch has brought out his first feature film, Stranger Than Paradise. The film, shot in black-and-white and in formal minimalist style, features an off-beat collection of characters.
 - Paris, 25 October: The sudden death of Pascale Ogier is reported. The actress, daughter of French actress Bulle Ogier, suffered a heart attack on the day before what would have been her 26th birthday. Beginning in French television in 1978, her subsequent film credits included Le Pond du Nord and Il est trop tard pour rien (both 1982), Signes extérieurs de richesse and Ghost Dance (both 1983), Les Nuits de la pleine lune and Ave Maria (both 1984) and the not-yet-released Rosette vend des roses.
- Los Angeles, 26 October:
 Arnold Schwarzenegger has found a role perfectly tailored to his superb physique and limited acting ability. In The Terminator he plays an unstoppable android assassin who is dispatched from the future to rub out seemingly insignificant waitress Linda Hamilton and change the future. Director James Cameron, another graduate of Roger Corman's New World Pictures, has fashioned a relentless, hi-tech science fiction thriller, pitting man against machine in a pounding actioner that never loosens its grip.
 - New York, 2 November: Produced by David Puttnam and directed by Roland Joffe, The Killing Fields is a British film with an epic sweep. It tells the true story of American journalist Sidney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) who was separated from and eventually reunited with his Cambodian friend, photographer Dith Pran, during the war in Cambodia. Cast in the role of Dith Pran is Cambodian doctor Haing S. Ngor, who himself had to flee the murderous Khmer Rouge when they took over his country with the horrifying results depicted.
- France, 4 November: Canal Plus, the first French TV pay-channel, has started its programs with 200,000 subscribers.
- Hollywood, 9 November:
 Horror specialist Wes Craven, director of The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, has always been fascinated by dreams, and the subconscious plays a driving role in his latest picture, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven got the idea from a news item about Laotian refugees so afflicted with horrifying nightmares that they became terrified of falling asleep. He has transplanted the theme to the realm of "teen terror" and in the process created an outrageous new bogeyman, the hamburger-faced, razor-taloned Freddy Krueger, a child murderer who was burned to death after escaping conviction and has now returned to his old stamping ground on Elm Street to haunt the dreams of its teenage inhabitants. They share common nightmares as Freddy, played by Robert Englund, stalks them in their dreams, using his claws to carve his way into their homes and their minds. Like some ghastly combination of Peter Pan and the Pied Piper, Freddy makes sure they never grow up.
- Hollywood, 26 November: Robert Zemeckis is busy shooting Back to the Future. Filming is taking place on a closed set to ensure that the plot of the $15 million fantasy, starring young newcomer Michael J. Fox, remains secret, but audiences are promised terrific special effects.
 - Los Angeles, 5 December: Paramount has closed the year with a monster hit, Beverly Hills Cop, starring Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley, an unorthodox Detroit cop who goes to Los Angeles to track down the killer of an old friend. In a part originally offered to Sylvester Stallone, Murphy seizes an otherwise unremarkable action caper by the scruff of the neck, trading streetwise profanity with everyone who crosses his path, including villainous art dealer Steven Berkoff. Paramount is understandably keen to hang on to Murphy and is now negotiating to keep him in golden chains with a five-picture deal.
- New York, 14 December: Francis Ford Coppola' new film, The Cotton Club, stars Richard Gere and tap wizard Gregory Hines. The crazy years of jazz in swinging Harlem are magnificently reconstructed in this truly sumptuous film for producer Robert Evans.
- Cannes, 14 December: Pierre Viot, former head of CNC, is to take over from Robert Favre Le Bret as Film Festival president.
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6 January - Hollywood, CA, 
16 April - Montecito, CA,