- Paris, 22 January:
 In Ginger & Fred, Federico Fellini pays a nostalgic homage to old troupers, and an affectionate tribute to both his former alter ego, Marcello Mastroianni, and his wife Giulietta Masina, whom he last directed 20 years ago in Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits). However, he also digs the knife into the crass commercialization of Italian television, at whose hands his films have been indiscriminately mangled. Mastroianni, flabby and balding, and Masina, still child-like without being coy, are a delight as has-been dancers, who performed a cabaret act as Rogers and Astaire before the war. Having gone their separate ways, they are reunited in a pathetic attempt to revive their past glory for a popular TV show.
- Washington, DC, 6 February: To mark the centenary of the Statue of Liberty, which was made by the French sculptor Bartholdi, French actress Catherine Deneuve today handed President Reagan a crystal replica of the statue as a gesture of France's friendship.
 - New York, 7 February: After two films that experimented with reality (Zelig, 1983 and The Purple Rose of Cairo, 1985), and a minor excursion into Runyonesque comedy (Broadway Danny Rose, 1984), Woody Allen has returned to the territory he knows best of all -- the emotional and psychological problems of middle-class Manhattan intellectuals. His latest movie, Hannah and Her Sisters, not only has the largest cast he has ever assembled (with a supporting role for himself), it is also one of his most accomplished. The movie is essentially a tragi-comic study of the relationship of three very different sisters, played superbly by Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest. The sisters' parents are played by Lloyd Nolan and Maureen O'Sullivan (Farrow's real mother). In addition to Allen, Michael Caine and Max von Sydow play the equally neurotic men in their lives.
- New York, 19 February:
 Much of Parting Glances is a weepie in the tradition of Warner Bros. melodramas of the 1930s about love and affliction such as 1939's Dark Victory starring Bette Davis. But what gives it an extra modern dimention and interest is that it is a romantic story of two male lovers parting against the backdrop of AIDS. It was directed, written and edited on a small budget by Bill Sherwood, who also composed the score and edited the sound. It is an engaging portrait of New York gay life, told and played with tenderness and humor.
 - New York, 7 March: The producing-directing team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, who have been making films together since 1963, have hit the jackpot with E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, adapted for the screen by their long-time collaborator, novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose Booker Prize-winning Heat and Dust Merchant-Ivory filmed in 1983. Literary adaptations are their specialty, and A Room with a View, filmed on location in Italy, boasts a superb cast that includes Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench and Helena Bonham Carter. The picture, which cost less than $5 million, looks like it will become a mainstream hit.
- New York 14 March: Paramount releases Ron Howard's Gung Ho, starring Michael Keaton and Gedde Watanabe. The story concerns an American auto plant that is purchased by the Japanese. Cultures clash as the American workers have to adapt to the Japanese work ethic. This comedy/drama co-stars Mimi Rodgers, John Tuturro and George Wendt.
 - Hollywood, 24 March:
 This year's Oscar® presentations will probably be remembered not for who won, but for who lost. The Academy's snubbing of Steven Spielberg, whose The Color Purple had 11 nominations, was the main talking point at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It was only the second time (The Turning Point, 1977, was the first) that a movie with 10 or more nominations failed to notch up a single win. The film's main rival, also with 11 nominations, Out of Africa, took eight Oscars®, including Best Picture. Sydney Pollack was considered lucky to win Best Director in an internationally-flavored year in which John Huston (Prizzi's Honor), Japan's Akira Kurosawa (Ran), the Brazilian Hector Babenco (Kiss of the Spider Woman) and Australian Peter Weir (Witness) were in the running. There were, however, no top acting awards for Out of Africa, those going to William Hurt for his sensitive portrayal as the effeminate but ultimately heroic prisoner in a South American jail in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and 61-year-old Geraldine Page for her hymn-singing pensioner in The Trip to Bountiful, after eight tries at the award. Although John Huston missed out personally, he shared the triumph of his daughter Anjelica's win as Best Supporting Actress for Prizzi's Honor, making the Huston's the first three-generation Oscar®-winning family. Don Ameche was voted Best Supporting Actor for Cocoon.
- Los Angeles, 25 March: Writer Oliver Stone, recognized for his screenplays for Cimino and De Palma, has made his directing debut with Salvador. The film is a vigorous denunciation of the State Department's role in Central America.
- Hollywood, 25 March:
 It appears that financier Kirk Kerkorian's purchase of United Artists in 1981 to merge it with MGM was a shrewd business move. His design was to make the company more appealing to a prospective buyer, rather than to genuinely upgrade it to viable production and distribution status once again. He has now sold the entire operation to CNN's Ted Turner. Though the full extent of their complicated deal is not yet clear, it appears that the cable TV mogul, based in Atlanta, Georgia, has bought the rights to their valuable backlog of old movies for broadcast on his cable TV network, and is unlikely to retain the film companies and their production facilities, which include the Culver City lot and film lab. Kerkorian's behavior recalls that of Howard Hughes, who virtually destroyed RKO studios, which he unloaded 30 years ago.
- Carmel, 4 April: Actor-director Clint Eastwood has been elected mayor of this small California town with 72 percent of the vote.
 - Paris, 9 April: Lika a boxer who only loses or wins by knockout, Jean-Jacques Beineix, who scored a terrific hit with Diva, was absolutely flattened three years ago by La Lune dans le caniveau (The Moon in the Gutter). He has since got to his feet, and his most recent film 37°2 le matin (Betty Blue) is sure to raise temperatures, mainly because of its pretty torrid love scenes, and the sensational new discovery, 22-year-old Béatrice Dalle. She plays Betty, a sensual but disgruntled waitress, who lives with her handyman boyfriend Zorg (Jean-Hughes Anglade). One day she burns down the beach shack in which they live, and they take off to Paris and then to a provincial town where, disillusioned and on drugs, she has a mental breakdown. Beineix's modish use of decor and color is an effective background to this frank depiction of amour fou.
- Los Angeles, 16 May:
 Like his brother Ridley, British director Tony Scott cut his cinematic teeth making television commercials. His mastery of the 30-second attention span-style has stood him in good stead in Top Gun, which he has turned into a two-hour recruiting advertisement for the U. S. Navy. At the Navy's elite aviation training school young tyros compete for glory in the air and on the ground. Ceaselessly smirking behind his Ray-Bans is pint-sized Tom Cruise, a gung-ho pilot and cardboard stud making a play for coolly leggy flying instructor Kelly McGillis. McGillis looms over Cruise in much the same way that tall leading ladies used to cast their shadows over Alan Ladd and, it has to be said, theirs is a pairing that generates absolutely no sexual chemistry. Scott seems more excited by the dogfights he stages like billion-dollar video games. What acting there is in the movie is accomplished by the boyish Anthony Edwards, cast as Cruise's sidekick, who emerges as the most personable and, therefore, ill-fated, of the clean-cut wannabes in this slickly contrived entertainment which, in Scott's hands, has become its own commercial.
- Cannes, 19 May: At this year's Film Festival, the jury's special prize was awarded to Andrei Tarkovsky's mystical Offret (The Sacrifice), while the main prize went to Alain Cavalier's Thérèse. The best actor award was given to Michel Blanc for his performance in Tenue de soirée (Evening Dress) and Martin Scorsese was named best director for After Hours.
- Hollywood, 24 May: Yakima Canutt, the pioneer stuntman and actor, has died of natural causes at 90 years of age. Canutt started out as a cowboy, winning the world champion all-around cowboy title in 1917 and 1919. This led to bit parts and stunt work in silent Westerns. However, with the arrival of sound his voice put an end to his acting career and be began full time stunt work. He is credited with turning stunting into a respectable job in the film industry.
- Washington, DC, 26 May: Gian-Carlo Coppola, the 23-year-old son of director Francis Ford Coppola, was killed yesterday when the boat he was piloting ran into a rope on South River in Maryland.
- Paris, 18 June: Release here of Marco Bellocchio's latest film Il Diavolo in corpo (The Devil in the Flesh). The film, which includes an explicit fellatio scene, has caused a scandal.
- Hollywood, 27 June:
 Big, bad, brassy Bette Midler is the world's most disagreeable kidnap victim in Ruthless People, directed by Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker, the team responsible for Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane! and Top Secret. She's been snatched by suburban couple Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater, whose fashion designs have been ripped off by Midler's slimy little husband Danny DeVito. The only problem is that DeVito, while bewailing the fate of his wife for the benefit of the cops, is quite happy to see his wife disappear -- he was planning to murder her anyway. Meanwhile his mistress Anita Morris, suspecting that DeVito has contrived the kidnap himself, is hatching a plot to blackmail him with the help of her slow-witted boyfriend Bill Pulman. Amid all these shenanigans, the only people who fail the ruthlessness test at the first hurdle are health-conscious kidnappers Slater and Reinhold, who keep lowering the ramsom price. All ends happily, if such a thing is possible with so many deeply unpleasant people stalking the screen. One suspects that the real purpose of the movie, apart from allowing Midler to holler her head off, is to send up Robert Redford's po-faced hit Ordinary People.
- London, 1 August: According to a long article in Company magazine last month, the most highly paid actor in the world is Sylvester Stallone. Based on the tremendous success of the Rocky films (which he wrote and, later, directed) and the two Rambos (which he co-wrote), Stallone is the first star to break the $10-million per picture barrier. He currently commands around $12 million per film, though this was topped by Marlon Brando, who got nearly $3.5 million for 12 days' shooting on Superman (1978). Other highly paid stars are Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, all around the $5.5 to $6 million mark, followed by Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson between $4 and $5 million, and Eddie Murphy the one black star able to match this. The women have earned less than the men throughout the post-studio era, and only Barbra Streisand at about $5 million and Meryl Streep ($4 million) currently earn the really big bucks.
- London, 8 August: Stanley Kubrick has completed Full Metal Jacket, his first film since The Shining six years ago.
 - Los Angeles, 15 August: One of the more engagingly dotty science fiction movies of the 1950s was The Fly, in which an unfortunate design defect in scientist Al Hedison's matter transmitter turned him into half-man, half-fly. Now David Cronenberg has remade this schlock classic, casting a frenetic Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Seth Brundle, whose teleportation experiments succeed only in fusing his genes with those of the insect of the title. The most literal-minded of horror and science fiction directors, Cronenberg piles one stomach-churning special effect on top of another as Goldblum's body is hideously distorted and his lingering humanity ebbs away. Cronenberg once observed that he could "conceive of a beauty contest for the inside of the human body where people would unzip themselves and show you the best spleen, the best heart, the best-looking viscera." The Fly is a truly visceral experience that the director sees as a metaphor for aging: "In time we all turn into monsters."
- New York, 20 August: Spike Lee, a young black director, has released his first feature film, She's Gotta Have It. His unconventional approach has been compared to that of Woody Allen by the New York critics.
- Hollywood, 26 August: Claude Lelouch is in America to promote his new film which opened here Friday, Un homme et une femme, 20 ans déjà (A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later). Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant reprise their roles from the original 1966 film. Lelouch said he made the film because he felt compelled "to see how people develop with time."
- Los Angeles, 1 September: British producer David Puttnam has taken up his appointment as chairman of Columbia Pictures, as was announced last June. Puttnam, previously an independent, is the first British producer to hold such a post in a major American studio.
- Venice, 3 September:
 Once again the Mostra has cast its vote for a French film. The fifth chapter of Eric Rohmer's series of Comedies and Proverbs, Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray or Summer), won this year's Golden Lion at the Film Festival. Unlike Rohmer's previous films, the dialogue in this comedy of manners was entirely improvised, creating both the tedium and fascination of real speech. Marie Rivière plays a Parisian secretary, alone during the long summer vacation, who takes herself off to various places but is bored and depressed everywhere. The green ray of the French title is taken from the Jules Verne novel. It refers to the last magical ray of sunset, the green of which is supposed to make observers more aware of the feelings and perceptions of others. Eric Rohmer's films have much the same effect.
 - London, 5 September: Busy, bustling Bob Hoskins gives his finest performance to date in Neil Jordan's dark drama Mona Lisa. He's superbly cast as the ex-con turned driver for beautiful, manipulative prostitute Cathy Tyson. Hoskins is a hard nut with a soft heart who is finally betrayed by love and devotion. Jordan and screenwriter David Leland take Hoskins and the audience on a voyage of grim discovery through a London poisoned by vice and greed, where armies of child prostitutes and tramps camp near the homes of the rich. This moral collapse is personified in the slimy figure of Hoskins' boss, played by Michael Caine like Alfie's psychopathic twin brother.
- Paris, 8 September: Pierre Lescure and René Bonnell have bought the television rights to 80 films produced by Paramount and Universal for Canal Plus, the French pay-channel.
- New York, 19 September: The French films were warmly received at the International Film Festival: Betrand Blier's Tenue de soirée (Evening Dress), Bertrand Tavernier's Autour de minuit ('Round Midnight), and Jean-Jacques Beineix's 37°2 le matin (Betty Blue).
- New York, 19 September:
 The third feature from the independent writer-director John Jarmusch, whose laconic, observational style has more affinity with Europe and Hollywood, is an engaging bittersweet lark. In Down by Law, a trio of incompatible no-hopers, played by musicians Tom Waits and John Lurie (who both contributed the soundtrack) and the Italian comic actor Roberto Benigni, share a jail cell in New Orleans, escape, and have bickering misadventures on the lam across Louisiana. Quirky and ironic, the movie is enhanced by its actors, particularly the hilarious Benigni in his English-language debut, and the arresting black-and-white cinematography of Germany's Robby Müller.
 - Los Angeles, 19 September: Writer-director David Lynch has come up with an audacious shocker that proves itself a determinedly weird, disturbingly original and subversive take on middle America. In Blue Velvet, clean, sweet, small-town youngsters Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern get caught up in the mystery surrounding nightclub chanteuse Isabella Rossellini and discover, to their horror, what goes on behind neat picket fences. Rossellini is tormented by psychotic sadist, kidnapper and drug dealer Dennis Hopper, whose intense performance dominates and is appallingly riveting. The sexual violence and obscenities will offend those squeamish of eye and ear.
- Paris, 22 September: French actresses Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve are suing Roger Vadim, ex-husband and lover respectively, for invasion of privacy. Both stars are asking 200,000 francs in compensation for the "scandalous revelations" about them in his autobiography, D'une étoile à l'autre (Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda: My Life With the Three Most Beautiful Women in the World). The book is already a bestseller.
- New York, 26 September:
 Laid-back Australian TV comedian Paul Hogan has hit the jackpot with 'Crocodile' Dundee, a vehicle tailor-made for his brand of amiable charm. He plays the adventurer of the title who shows American reporter Linda Koslowski around the outback before giving up wrestling the local animal life to tangle with the low life that infests her native Manhattan. Hogan's wry charm suggests that Dundee's legendary fieldcraft might hover on the fraudulent, but he certainly adapts quickly to life among the coke-snorting sophisticates of New York City. Asked why he likes the Big Apple, he replies, "It's a real lunatic asylum. That's why I like it. I fit right in."
 - New York, 3 October: Explaining why he filmed the sordid tale of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon, director Alex Cox has said, "Though a lot of people are put off by the idea of a love story between these two unsavory-seeming people, it is a love story..." In Sid and Nancy, Cox chronicles the downward spiral described by the Sex Pistols' singer and his junkie girlfriend, played by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb. It's grim stuff, characterized by the moment when Nancy appears to Sid while he is watching Night of the Living Dead on TV.
- Los Angeles, 17 October:
 A quarter of a century after playing poolroom shark 'Fast' Eddie Felson in The Hustler, Paul Newman reprises the role in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money. Eddie is greying around the tamples now and selling liquor for a living. But he returns to the world of high-stakes pool when he encounters a young version of himself in flashy cue man Tom Cruise, whom he decides to promote in another shot at the bigtime. Electrifying performances by both principals and fine support from Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Cruise's girlfriend compensate for the film's anti-climactic conclusion.
- Helsinki, 18 October: Release of Aki Kaurismäki's latest film Varjoja Paratiisissa (Shadows in Paradise), with Matti Pellonpää and Kati Outinen. It is the third and final film of the director's so-called "working class" trilogy, and confirms him as Finland's most prominent filmmaker.
- Los Angeles, 22 October: With Something Wild, starring Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith, director Jonathan Demme leads the audience into the fantastical dramatic adventures of a young executive kidnapped by an irresistibly eccentric girl. The film opens today.
- Paris, 23 October: A restored copy, with added soundtrack, of Marcel L'Herbier's silent classic L'Inhumaine was projected in the great hall at La Villette. The film was produced in 1924.
- Los Angeles, 13 November: Illness has not prevented John Huston from holding a press conference to protest about the coloring of his black-and-white film, The Maltese Falcon (1941), by the WTBS television channel. This condemnation of the practice adds weight to the criticism already proffered by the Directors Guild of America and the American Film Institute over the coloring of films such as the Michael Curtiz classic Captain Blood.
- Hollywood, 14 November: Columbia is releasing Luis Valdez's La Bamba in bilingual versions.
- Paris, 17 December:
 Jean-Jacques Annaud is not a director who goes for the easy option. After having made Quest for Fire (1981), the Stone-Age romance with an invented language, he has now tackled Umberto Eco's complex, metaphysical, medieval detective story, The Name of the Rose. Despite having had to reduce the plot for cinematic reasons, Annaud has almost carried off the impossible. Most impressive are the claustrophobic sets, especially the labyrinthine library, through which move Sean Connery as William of Baskerville, a Franciscan Sherlock Holmes, and Christian Slater as his teenage apprentice, trying to solve the mystery of a series of murders in a monastery. Connery has just the right mixture of humor and gravitas to make him an ideal guide. The monks, with F. Murray Abraham as a bald-pated, bearded inquisitor, Ron Perlman as the deformed dogsbody Salvatore, and Michel Lonsdale as an ambiguous abbott, are a wonderful collection of Breughel-esque grotesques.
 - New York, 19 December: Platoon is the first movie about the war in Vietnam made by a veteran of that conflict. Director Oliver Stone, the son of a wealthy family, dropped out of Yale, volunteered for the infantry as a private and saw the war in Southeast Asia "from the lowest level," being twice wounded and decorated. In 1975, as Saigon was falling, Stone wrote a script about the war which has taken 11 years to bring to the screen. The movie reflects his own experience, with Charlie Sheen cast as a callow "grunt" (and Stone's alter ego) over whom two sergeants, nice Willem Dafoe and nasty Tom Berenger, fight a moral battle. Stone, who is a determined political liberal, entered films as a writer-director with the 1973 Seizure. He won an Oscar® for the screenplay of Midnight Express and scored a success earlier this year with Salvador, a hard-hitting attack on U.S. policy in Central America.
- Paris, 29 December:
 Andrei Tarkovsky, aged 54, has just died of cancer. The Russian director had been extremely ill for several months, and was thus unable to go to the Cannes Film Festival last May, where his final film, Offret (The Sacrifice), won the Special Jury Prize. This Franco-Swedish production, filmed on the island of Götland in the Baltic Sea, was his second film after Nostalgia (1983), during his self-imposed exile from the USSR. His career in his own country had been a long struggle against the Soviet authorities, especially with their initial interdiction of Andrei Rublem (1966) and Mirror (1974). His two science fiction films, Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), somehow managed to escape their disapproval. Tarkovsky's perfectionism and rich pictorial sense were already evident in his first feature, Ivan's Childhood in 1962. His seven films in 24 years are among the most intensely personal and visually powerful statements to have come out of Eastern Europe during the postwar era.
- Paris, 31 December: French cinemas drew just over 1.63 million people this year while America (with only four times the population) had 10.3 million entries.
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2 January - Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, CA, 
15 August - Fullerton, CA, 
