- Paris, 6 January: The theater company operated by Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault (uncle of Marie-Christine Barrault who starred in Ma nuit chez Maud) is presenting a play written and directed by filmmaker Eric Rohmer.
- Avoriaz, 24 January: The Fantastic Film Festival's main prize has been awarded to the American director Jack Sholder for The Hidden, which concerns an alien on the run in America. To get his kicks, it kills anything that gets in its way, and uses the body as a new hiding place. This alien has a goal in life; power. However, he is hotly pursued by another alien who's borrowed the body of a dead FBI agent.
- Paris, 3 February:
 Étienne Chatiliez, a former director of quirky French TV commercials, has made a tremendous feature debut with La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille (Life Is a Long Quiet River), one of the funniest and most incisive comedies for many a year. The plot, poking fun at class differences, involves two babies being switched at birth. One infant goes to the Le Quesnoys, middle-class, wealthy and respectable; the other is brought up by the unemployed, illiterate and semi-criminal Groseilles family. When the error is discovered, the former family wishes to buy back their son, a situation that unleashes chaos in their well-ordered household. Apart from Daniel Gélin, the excellent cast is not well-known.
- Paris, 7 February: Opening of the Vidéothèque de Paris (Paris Video Library). The public can now consult a databank of images on individual video screens. Films related to the capital will also be screened.
- New York, 20 February: With The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Philip Kaufman has made an intelligent and faithful adaptation of Milan Kundera's novel. The film, which stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin, is now on release.
- Berlin, 23 February: Chinese director Yimou Zhang's Hong gao liang (Red Sorghum) has been awarded the Golden Bear at this year's festival. An honorary Golden Bear was awarded to Alec Guinness.
 - Los Angeles, 26 February: John Waters, a camp underground favorite for years, famed for his courageous bad taste in films such as Pink Flamingos (1972) and Polyester (1981) starring Divine, the director's drag "prima donna," has now made a mainstream movie. Hairspray is a crazy, good-natured, inoffensively satirical 60s musical, with lively dance numbers and a nostalgic soundtrack. Both Waters and former hairdresser Divine, who plays the plump heroine's fat mother, hail from Baltimore, which the director has characterized as "The Hair-Do Capital of the World." There are certainly plenty of beehives bobbing on "The Corny Collins Show," the teens' TV favorite, to which Ricki Lake aspires. Once there, she decides it's time to do something about the all-white composition of the show's teen dance corps.
- San Francisco, 19 March: A hypnotic documentary called The Thin Blue Line world premiered last night as part of the San Francisco Film Festival. The film, directed by Errol Morris, shows the bizarre aspects of a real-life murder case through the words of the actual participants - Randall Adams (convicted) and David Harris (suspect).
- France, 20 March: At this year's Women's Film Festival in Crétil, there were over 100 films from 20 countries. A special tribute was paid to Agnès Varda, whose diptych on Jane Birkin was chosen to open and close the festival. Among festival highlights was a retrospective of nine of Dominique Sanda's films. Spectators were also able to see Anglo-American actress Ida Lupino's work as a director.
- Los Angeles, 11 April:
 In what could be called the Year of the Chinese, The Last Emperor won all nine Oscars® for which it was nominated -- the first time this has happened since Gigi in 1958. Although it is the first Western film made almost entirely in the new China, and although the majority of the cast is Chinese, its Oscar®-winning director (Bernardo Bertolucci), cameraman (Vittorio Storaro) and editor (Gabriella Cristiani) are Italians; the producer (Jeremy Thomas) and co-screenwriter (Mark Peploe) are British; one of the stars is an Irish-born Englishman (Peter O'Toole); and of the credited composers, one is Japanese (Ryuichi Sakamoto), one is Chinese (Cong Su), and one is a Scot (David Byrne). The film is a long (163 minutes), fascinating, sumptuous epic following the life of Pu Yi from the time he succeeds to the throne of China at the age of three, to his dotage as a gardener in a Peking park. The Last Emperor so swept the boards that the only other picture to take away more than one award was Norman Jewison's Moonstruck, for which Cher as a drab widow transformed into a passionate and attractive woman, and Olympia Dukakis as her warm mother, gained Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress prizes respectively. The Best Actor was Michael Douglas for his portrayal of a ruthless stockbroker in Oliver Stone's Wall Street. First-time nominee and winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar® was Sean Connery as the incorruptible Irish cop in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. Denmark won the Foreign Language Film award with Babettes gæstebud (Babette's Feast), a superb adaptation of the Karen Blixen story about a French cordon bleu cook who provides an austere remote Jutland community with a gastronomic treat. A cinematic feast directed by Gabriel Axel.
 - Los Angeles, 12 April: The strike by the Writers Guild of America is now in its sixth week, and is really hitting the movie and television industries hard. Union TV writers halted their work on the script for last night's Academy Awards ceremony, and CBS had to shelve two new shows. The size of the pickets outside studios reveals a solidarity of the writers that did not exist in 1985 when the 9,000-member guild caved in after a half-hearted two-week strike. Among those walking the picket line in front of the 20th Century-Fox studios has been the actress Patty Duke, president of the Screen Actors Guild. Also out protesting were James L. Brooks and Albert Brooks, the director and star of Broadcast News, who stood, ironically, beneath a billboard advertising their Fox movie. The main point at issue is that producers are seeking a two-tier pay system in which first year TV writers would receive less money. They also want to define low-budget films as those costing less than $8 million. For low-budget movies, writers can be paid roughly half of the average $40,000 minimum fee for writing a movie treatment and screenplay. Both sides seemed surprised that the negotiations ended in a strike.
- New York, 22 April: Crown publishers have just brought out a new book that they refer to as "a tour de force history of the American film industry." Titled The Hollywood Story, it was written by Joel Finler, an American movie historian currently living in London.
 - Paris, 11 May:
 Shown out of competition this year at Cannes, Le Grand bleu (The Big Blue) was given a cool reception by the critics, but in the movie theaters where is is already playing, huge young audiences are welcoming it enthusiastically. It has always been a dream of the 29-year-old Luc Besson to make a film inspired by the life of Jacques Mayol, a man who dedicated his life to deep-sea diving without an aqualung. Although Besson was born in Paris, his richest experiences have been at the coast. Le Grand bleu was shot over nine months, mostly in Greece and Sicily, and is divided into two parts. The first part, in black-and-white, evokes the childhood of the hero diving off the coast of a Greek island; the second, in color, follows the adult Mayol attempting to beat the world diving record without oxygen. He feels at one with the creatures of the sea, and talks to dolphins. The role, which was originally refused by both Christopher Lambert and Mel Gibson, is taken by the unknown Jean-Marc Barr. His girlfriend, a New York insurance agent, is played by Rosanna Arquette. And Jean Reno is his boyhood friend and rival. The magnificent underwater photography in CinemaScope is counterpointed by the music of Eric Serra.
 - Cannes, 23 May:
 Three ambitious films dealing with political and ethical issues were awarded the top prizes at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The Golden Palm was given to Pelle erobreren (Pelle the Conqueror), a moving and impressively photographed epic about the exploitation of farm workers in turn-of-the-century Denmark. Directed by Dane Bille August, a former cinematographer, it stars Max von Sydow. This is a sensational double for Denmark after the triumph of Babette's Feast at the Oscars® exactly a month ago. The winner of the Special Jury Prize, Chris Menges' British film A World Apart, is a powerful indictment of apartheid in South Africa delivered through the true story of two of its brave opponents. The jury thought Krzysztof Kieslowski the best director for his Krótki film o zabijaniu (A Short Film About Killing), the shock entry of the festival. This work presents in graphic detail the story of the senseless and brutal murder of a taxi driver by a young and aimless drifter, and the man's subsequent arrest and execution.
- New York, 3 June:
 Penny Marshall's Big has to be the best body-swap movie made in anyone's memory. This is fairy-tale time (though with a wry, poignant sting in the tail) as a young boy fervently asks the genie in a fairground wishing machine to make him a man. The wish is granted and he wakes up as Tom Hanks, though inside the man's body the boy remains. The movie is superbly and subtly scripted and directed to avoid the pitfalls of a plot in which the boy-man becomes, among other things, romantically involved (with Elizabeth Perkins). Hanks is an absolute and convincing delight, whether gleefully enjoying himself in the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store, or attacking a baby ear of corn at a cocktail party in some bewilderment. This has to be the summer's "big" one.
- Paris, 7 June: Canal Plus has signed an agreement with cinema exhibitors restricting the screening of films before 11 p.m. (instead of 10 p.m. as previously).
- New York, 15 June: Release of Ron Shelton's Bull Durham, a baseball romance starring Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon. She's a fan who has an affair with one minor-league baseball player each season and meets an up-and-coming pitcher (Tim Robbins) and the experienced catcher assigned to him (Costner).
 - Hollywood, 22 June:
 Bob Hoskins has one of the most intriguing acting assignments of his career in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, playing a down-at-the-heel detective on the trail of a murderer with a small army of cartoon characters as his co-stars. There's nothing new about combining live action with animation -- Gene Kelly capered with cartoon mouse Jerry in Anchors Aweigh in 1945 -- but there has been nothing quite like this Spielberg-Disney production, directed by Robert Zemeckis, whose state-of-the-art integration of animated and real-life figures has cost a reported $70 million. The picture's animation director Richard Williams has said: "We were essentially making two films -- one live action and one animated -- to be fused together into one film by the optical department of Industrial Light + Magic." The manic Roger Rabbit is voiced by Charles Fleischer (best known for his work in creepy features like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Bad Dreams) and married to an animated seductress called Jessica with a mind-blowing figure and the sexy tones of an uncredited Kathleen Turner. As Jessica explains, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."
- Paris, 23 June: Producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier has been elected as the head of Unifrance Film, the industry organization that promotes French films.
- Los Angeles, 15 July:
 Bruce Willis, who made his Hollywood debut last year in Blind Date, is set for stardom after his gritty performance as super-tough New York cop John McLane in Die Hard. In the hands of commercials king John McTiernan, Die Hard explodes on the screen as a cross between Lethal Weapon and The Towering Inferno as Willis does battle with a team of international terrorists holed up with a group of hostages on the upper stories of a Los Angeles high-rise. The stunts and special effects, coordinated by Robert Edlund, are non-stop as Willis plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with the chief heavy, smooth British classical actor Alan Rickman. These days in Hollywood the best villains have British accents.
 - Tokyo, 16 July: Release of Katsuhio Ôtomo's Akira, a $10 million feature that redefines the Japanese anime. Artist-writer Ôtomo began telling the story of Akira as a comic book series in 1982 but took a break from 1986 to 1988 to write, direct, supervise, and design this animated film version. In the film, Kaneda is a bike gang leader whose close friend Tetsuo gets involved in a government secret project knowned as Akira. On his way to save Tetsuo, Kaneda runs into a group of anti-government activists, greedy politicians, irresponsible scientists and a powerful military leader. The confrontation sparks off Tetsuo's supernatural power leading to bloody death, a coup attempt and the final battle in Tokyo Olympiad where Akira's secrets were buried 30 years ago.
- Hollywood, 7 August: The scriptwriters' strike has come to an end after a five-month battle. Losses to the film studios are estimated at $150 million.
- Los Angeles, 10 August: Francis Ford Coppola pays tribute to American business spirit and optimism with Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Jeff Bridges plays an indpendent car-builder determined to break the monopoly of the big Detroit firms in this film based on a true story.
- London, 29 August: Release of Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Dean Stockwell, a comedy about the Mafia and its legendary bad taste.
 New York, 23 September: Like many other films by Canadian director David Cronenberg, Dead Ringers presents the cinematic and psychological equivalent of an automobile accident -- you dare not look, but you can't turn away. The film marks a directorial breakthrough for Cronenberg, who was able to continue some of the themes explored in his earlier horror films while graduating to a higher, more critically "respectable" level of artistic sophistication. The film is loosely based, amazingly enough, on a true story about twin gynecologists who routinely traded each others' identities, lives and even lovers. Utilizing innovative split-screen technology (years before computer manipulation made such trickery much easier), the film stars Jeremy Irons in flawless dual roles as the identical brothers Beverly and Elliot Mantle. Their ability to instantly switch identities leads them to a shared relationship with a well-known actress (Geneviève Bujold) who has three cervixes, and, ultimately, a physical and psychological tailspin that sends them both to the brink of madness and death. The scenario suggests that both men are halves of a whole, and that one cannot exist without the other. But when Beverly pursues a kinky, drug-addicted affair with the actress, his more self-controlled brother is helpless to prevent their mutual decline. In this way Dead Ringers becomes a fascinating and stylistically clinical study of duality, and Cronenberg doesn't shy away from the dark and unpleasant aspects of the story. (One look at the movie's display of bizarre gynecological instruments and you'll know why women find this film particularly -- and unforgettably -- disturbing.) -- Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com
- London, 15 September:
 Prince Charles has opened England's new temple to the cinema, the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI). The 3,000 square-meter museum is, like the National Film Theatre, situated under Waterloo Bridge. The MOMI offers visitors a chronological history of the cinema, illustrated by astonishing sets and machines.
- Greece, 27 September: Under the aegis of the European Year of Cinema and Television, authors from the EEC have adopted the text of a European audio-visual charter. It is a real declaration of television and film authors' rights.
 - Los Angeles, 30 September: Bird is a departure for director Clint Eastwood. It is not a Western but a sober and sad film on the life of saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, played by Forest Whitaker, who gives a terrific central performance. Eastwood has been a jazz fan (and sometime musician) for years, and he avoids the clichés so often encountered in jazz films in this long (161 minutes), brooding and enthralling biopic of a 1940s musical legend who fell victim to his chemical excesses and convinced the doctor who pronounced him dead that he was a good four decades older than he actually was.
- New York, 9 October:
 Indian director Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! arrives here already covered in awards. Deservedly so, for Miss Nair makes of her sad and terrible tale -- a 12-year-old boy adrift in Bombay lives the life of the street among pimps, prostitutes, drug peddlers and poverty -- a thoroughly absorbing pageant. She manages some humor and flirts attractively with melodrama, getting wonderful performances from a cast of largely amateur players. Krishna, the child at the center of the action, is remarkably played by the irresistible Safik Syed, literally plucked from the gutters of the city for the film.
 - London, 14 October: The comedy hit of the year looks like it's A Fish Called Wanda, directed by 78-year-old Charles Crichton. It's a caper movie in which tight-assed British barrister John Cleese becomes entangled with sexy con artist Jamie Lee Curtis and her weird boyfriend Kevin Kline, a psychopathic burglar with ludicrous intellectual pretensions and a taste for live flesh. The combination of American talent with Monty Python graduates Cleese and Michael Palin and Crichton's deft skills (he directed the 1951 classic The Lavender Hill Mob) has produced an off-beat comedy with some hard edges -- at one point the gang of thieves tries to give an old woman a fatal heart attack by killing her pet corgis. One of Curtis' weaknesses, though, will make you want to sign up for a French language course at Berlitz.
- Boston, 14 October:
 Jodie Foster, one of Hollywood's most determined and talented actresses, is once again courting controversy, this time as the victim of gang rape in The Accused, directed by Jonathan Kaplan. Public prosecutor Kelly McGillis cuts a deal with the defense -- Foster was drunk, stoned and dressed like a hooker, and one of the three accused is a clean-cut college boy. But Foster rebels, and McGillis brings new charges of solicitation against the men who witnessed the rape, in the game room of a bar, and did nothing to stop it. The picture tackles the current issue of whether a woman who flirts, openly displaying her sexuality, invites rape even when she says no, as if by exhibiting active desire she relinquishes control over her body. The rape itself is not shown until near the end of the film, and then in an unblinking detail that some critics have suggested will turn the movie audience itself into voyeurs. Nonetheless, this is a brave film in which Kaplan and producers Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing (who were responsible for last year's Fatal Attraction) tread a fine line between social concern, feminism and exploitation.
 - Paris, 22 October: Wherever it has been shown, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, with a screenplay adapted by Paul Schrader from Nikos Kazantzakis' book, has caused controversy and sometimes violent demonstrations, whether in Protestant America and Great Britain, or in Catholic Italy. In America, there were pickets ouside the movie theaters where it was showing, and militant religious groups threatened to use bombs. After similar protests at the Venice Film Festival, and a condemnation from the Vatican, trouble has now flared up in France. Five Catholics set fire to a Paris cinema for daring to show the film. What has caused such passions to be aroused? Principally, it is the dream-on-the-cross sequence, during which Jesus imagines himself making love to Mary Magdalene, and dreams of the companionship of marriage and a family. Scorsese wanted to show Christ as a man suffering human doubts and desires, and to present us with a Christ for the 1980s. Far from being blasphemous, this portrait is reconcilable with the Bible's notion of the Son of God made man.
- Paris, 26 October: Jean-Jacques Annaud's latest film, L'Ours (The Bear), has drawn 3.5 million spectators in its first week of release here. The maker of Quest for Fire has told his charming and unusual tale from the bear's point of view using natural sounds and no dialogue.
- Amsterdam, 27 October:
 George Sluizer's new thriller guarantees 106 minutes of nail-biting. The theme of Spoorloos (The Vanishing) is obsession -- particularly the psychopathic variety -- and the movie has one of the most truly shocking climaxes of any film, and comes with a "don't tell your friends" plea. The plot has a young Dutch couple, Rex and Saskia (Gene Bervoets and Johanna Ter Steege), driving on holiday through France. At a motorway stop, in broad daylight and surrounded by people, she goes to fetch a drink and is never seen again. The rest of the film is taken up with Rex's search for her -- how he obsesses on her disappearance, goes on TV to make public appeals, keeps annual appointments where he is surreptitiously observed by her abductor, and is unable to maintain a new releationship because of his concentration on the past. We also receive a mundane look at Saskia's abductor's daily life and his sociopathic obsession. The film climaxes with an unstoppable and grimly inevitable series of decisions on Rex's part that make it a must-see for fans of the genre.
- New York, 29 October: Release of Woody Allen's Another Woman, starring Gena Rowlands, Mia Farrow and Gene Hackman, a somber drama reflecting the fears and regrets of a 50-year-old woman.
- Marseilles, 31 October: Bertrand Blier has started shooting his new film, Trop belle pour toi! (Too Beautiful for You), starring Gérard Depardieu, Joseane Balasko and Carole Bouquet.
- Paris, 19 November: Eric Serra's score for Luc Besson's Le Grand bleu (The Big Blue) has won the prize for the best film music at the Victoires de la musique.
- Berlin, 28 November: Over 300 million viewers watched last night's televised coverage of the first European Oscars from the Theatre des Westerns. Krzysztof Kieslowski's controversial entry Krótki film o zabijaniu (A Short Film About Killing) was voted Best Film. Wim Wenders won Best Director for Wings of Desire, while the Best Actor and Actress prizes went to Max von Sydow [Pelle erobreren (Pelle the Conqueror)] and Carmen Maura [Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown)]. Louis Malle won the prize for Best Script for Au revoir les enfants. Ingmar Bergman was given a standing ovation as he received a special life achievement award.
- Paris, 7 December:
 After appearing opposite Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in the disastrous Ishtar last year, Isabelle Adjani has made a glorious return to French cinema in the title role of Camille Claudel. The sister of the writer Paul Claudel, Camille studied sculpture with Auguste Rodin, who recognized her remarkable artistic talent. But she became the victim of 19th-century bourgeois social codes, and descended into madness. Cinematographer Bruno Nuytten's directing debut brilliantly shows the agony and ecstasy of creation. The film, above all, has Adjani giving the performance of her life, matched by Gérard Depardieu as a powerful Rodin, her master and lover.
- Paris, 8 December: The Louis Delluc Prize has been awarded to Michel Deville's La Lectrice, starring Miou-Miou.
 - New York, 9 December: Feisty British director Alan Parker takes on the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi Burning. Two FBI agents, tight-lipped play-it-by-the-book type Willem Dafoe and more instinctive Southern lawman Gene Hackman, head up a government probe into the disappearance of three civil rights workers in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. There's a strong period feel and a persuasive performance from Hackman as the former small-town sheriff who figures out how to crack the case by enlisting the help of local resident Frances McDormand. But the film's concentration on the efforts of two white men, and the marginalization of blacks in the story, have brought accusations of racism that Parker strongly denies.
- New York, 16 December: The New York Film Critics have voted Lawrence Kasdan's The Accidental Tourist the best film of 1988.
- Hollywood, 16 December:
 The combined salaries of the two stars of Barry Levinson's Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, totaled around $9 million, though few doubt it was money well spent. They play contrasting brothers -- unfeeling money-mad yuppie Cruise, autistic Hoffman -- who get to know each other during a four-day trip from Cincinnati to L.A. in a '49 Buick sedan. The acting is a tour de force for two hands, one young and one old; Cruise skillfully manages the change from selfish to loving, and Hoffman's year-long research into autism shows in every detail of his funny and touching performance.
 - New York, 21 December: In the aristocratic world of 18th-century France a ruthless marquise enlists the help of a like-minded count to wreak sexual havoc in the lives of those around them. Adapted from Christopher Hampton's play, itself based on the classic French epistolary novel of the period, Dangerous Liaisons is an elegant study of seduction, desire and control with a predominantly American cast. Glenn Close is the marquise whose schemes lead to the death of her ally, the reptilian Vicomte de Valmont, played by John Malkovich. Also prominent is Michelle Pfeiffer as the predatory Valmont's pious victim.
- New York, 21 December:
 Director Mike Nichols has made a Capraesque, fairy-tale comedy of modern Wall Street manners with Working Girl. The wish fulfillment element of the movie is a throwback to the 1930s, proving that in an age of violence, audiences still welcome a romantic comedy in which not a drop of ketchup is spilt. The working girl is secretary Melanie Griffith, who commutes from Staten Island daily to slave for a gorgon boss (Sigourney Weaver). When the latter goes away for a while, Griffith spots the opportunity to climb the corporate ladder by deviously taking her place, and ensnaring Harrison Ford in the process. Delightful stuff that should pay dividends for Fox.
 - New York, 22 December: The German director Percy Adlon, whose work, covering a wide variety of subject matter, is much admired in Europe, has made his first film in America. One hopes that it won't be his last. Casting his German star, the flamboyantly overweight Marianne Sägebrecht, to lead an otherwise all-American cast, notably Jack Palance and C.C.H. Pounder, he has come up with the truly magical Bagdad Cafe. Sägebrecht plays a Bavarian tourist, dumped in the Mojave Desert by her unpleasant husband. She finds her way to the dilapidated motel of the title, settles in, and transforms the place and its no-hope inhabitants. An original, funny and tender collector's piece.
- Paris, 30 December: Le Monde has published an interview with Jean-Luc Godard that quotes him as saying, "The cinema is dead."
- Hollywood, 31 December: Disney studios have reached almost 20 percent of all annual takings with three big successes: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Three Men and a Baby and Good Morning, Vietnam.
- Los Angeles, 31 December: Fifteen million videotapes of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial have been sold, a record number.
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5 February - Saxtead, Suffolk, England, 
6 September - Palm Beach, FL,