- Japan, 10 January: Akira Kurosawa has begun shooting Dreams, a American-Japanese co-production. The movie presents a series of vignettes, one of which is played by director Martin Scorsese.
- London, 13 January:
 The cruel limitations placed on endeavor by South Africa's apartheid laws have resulted in a parochial and underdeveloped film industry. It is, therefore, quite an achievement for writer and director Oliver Schmitz (white) and writer-actor Thomas Mogotlane (black) to have made Mapantsula (aka Hustler) at all. Already seen at Cannes last year, it unveils a vivid picture of township life in Soweto. The main character, Panic (Mogotlane), an apolitical petty gangster, is finally forced to confront the political realities of the police state in which he lives. Low-budget but lively and revealing, the similarity in the habits and conditions of its under-class to that of New York's Harlem is striking.
- New York, 30 January: Premiere of the new print of 1939's Gone With the Wind, with the color completely restored.
 - Paris, 1 February: After having broken all box-office records in Spain, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) looks as though it might do the same in Paris and elsewhere. Although Pedro Almodóvar's previous picture, La Ley del deseo (Law of Desire), did well last year, it was nothing compared to the impact of his seventh feature, which has really put Spain on the commercial map. The story focuses on Pepa (Carmen Maura), a volatile and attractive actress, pregnant by Ivan, her philandering lover who, like herself dubs Hollywood movies. Unaware of her condition, he blithely abandons her via a farewell message on her answering machine. As all her efforts to contact him fail, Pepa grows distraught and hysterical, setting fire to her bed, and flinging the telephone out the window. Yet she is still able to help other women with their men problems. A series of increasingly bizarre and manic events develops, among them the spiking of gazpacho with a heavy dose of barbiturates. Almodóvar, attempting to recapture the glossy and vulgar visual style of 20th Century-Fox movies of the 1950s, has delivered a rapid farce without any diminution in his affection for the characters. All the performances are splendid, especially from the smoldering Maura, who is destined to be a big star.
- Hollywood, 16 February: Jane Fonda has divorced Tom Hayden after 16 years of marriage. He is said to be having an affair with Morgan Fairchild, the former star of the TV series "Flamingo Road."
- Austin, 1 March: Randall Dale Adams, the central figure in last year's powerful documentary The Thin Blue Line, saw his conviction overturned today in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
- Paris, 2 March: Tom Cruise, who has been in France to promote Rain Man, has canceled all his engagements and returned to the U.S. after a short stay in the American Hospital at Neuilly with the flu.
- New York, 6 March: The Museum of Modern Art is paying tribute to French producer Marin Karmitz, head of MK2, with the screening of 10 films produced by him, including Une affaire de femmes, directed by Claude Chabrol.
- London, 18 March: Terry Gilliam's startlingly innovative update of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, rumored to have cost an excessive $45 million, opens today in London.
 - Hollywood, 29 March:
 After a bizarre opening sequence that featured Snow White (actress Eileen Bowman) on a journey to "follow the Hollywood stars" that took her from Army Archerd in the Shrine lobby and into the auditorium with sets representing the Cocoanut Grove and Grauman's Chinese Theater let her encounter beefy chorines, Munchkins, Merve Griffin and singing partner Rob Lowe along the way, producer Allan Carr's telecast of the 61st Academy Awards finally began with a Cinderella-costumed Lily Tomlin noting that "More than a billion and a half people watched that. And at this very moment they're trying to make sense of it."
Once the awards began to be presented, though, things got back to normal. Dustin Hoffman was judged Best Actor for his remarkable performance as the autistic Charlie Babbitt in Rain Man. In fact, Rain Man, which also won Best Picture, Best Director (Barry Levinson) and Best Original Screenplay Oscars®, overwhelmed all other contenders, including the eye-boggling blend of live action and animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which won for Film Editing, Sound and Visual Effects. Rabbit's animation director, Richard Williams, was presented with a Special Achievement Award. The 26-year-old Jodie Foster, already a veteran of 20 films, carried off the Best Actress prize as the rape victim in The Accused, while Geena Davis was voted Best Supporting Actress for her comic role in The Accidental Tourist. Kevin Kline received the Best Supporting Actor award as the whacko American criminal in A Fish Called Wanda.
- Paris, 3 April: Elizabeth Taylor was at the Automobile Club to promote "Passion," her new perfume for men. Five hundred journalists from 35 countries attended the reception which was covered by Mondovision.
- Hollywood, 18 April: First day's shooting of The Two Jakes, directed by and starring Jack Nicholson. The film, Nicholson's third as director, is a sequel to Roman Polanski's film, Chinatown (1974).
- Chicago, 21 April:
 Despite the popularity of his baseball sex comedy, Bull Durham, Kevin Costner's wisdom in making back-to-back baseball movies was questioned by industry skeptics. But the magical Field of Dreams is a vindication of the star's faith. Director Phil Alden Robinson's fine adaptation of Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella is an enchanting, funny fable of reconciliation and faith that is sparked when an Iowa farmer, prompted by a ghostly voice, turns part of his cornfield into a baseball diamond to host heavenly players. Burt Lancaster, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta and Amy Madigan offer excellent support. The result of a cross-country journey of self-redemption makes for a male weepie that will have even tough guys groping for the Kleenex.
 - Montréal, 2 May: For filmgoers, it is a day of celebration in Montréal, as well as in other parts of the country, because the National Film Board of Canada is 50 years old today. In 1939, to counteract the prevailing dominance of Hollywood and to coordinate all government film activity, the Board was set up under John Grierson, the British documentary producer, who became the dominion's first Government Film Commissioner. Grierson wanted to make the NFB the "eyes of Canada" and to ensure that it would "through a national use of cinema, see Canada and see it whole: its people and its purpose." He brought over film experts from England, Joris Ivens from Holland, and the animator Norman McLaren from Scotland via New York.
 The NFB then spearheaded Canada's role as a provider of war propaganda, especially in two series, World in Action and Canada Carries On, which were shown in many parts of the world. After the war the Board not only concentrated on educational films, but also had a profound effect in the long term on the Canadian cinema in general. Through its distribution system, people even in the remotest areas were able to see films. It also shared an important influence on Canadian filmmakers, most of whom have worked for the NFB. In the early 1960s, it became more involved with features, and gave increasing support to productions in French.
- Paris, 19 May: Brigitte Bardot has agreed to return to the screen but in a very different role. She is to host a program on Channel 1 called "SOS" in defense of her four-legged friends, a cause she has espoused for the last 15 years.
 - Cannes, 23 May:
 The jury of this year's Cannes Film Festival, presided over by Wim Wenders, expressed eagerness to reward a work that would encourage confidence in the future of cinema. Thus, they had no hesitation in handing the Golden Palm to sex, lies and videotape, directed by first-time filmmaker Steven Soderbergh. It was written in eight days, shot in a month and edited in four weeks, on the tiny budget -- by Hollywood standards -- of $1.2 million. The result is a remarkably assured work, full of insight, humor and eroticism, which deals with the emotional lives of four young people. Sharing the Special Jury Prize were Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, about a touching friendship between a small boy and an old projectionist through an affection for the cinema, and Trop belle pour toi! (Too Beautiful for You), Bertrand Blier's perverse comedy in which a man with a beautiful wife falls for his plain and dowdy secretary.
 - New York, 2 June: It is three years since the Australian-born Peter Weir's last film, The Mosquito Coast, was greeted with less than enthusiasm. Now, 14 years after Picnic at Hanging Rock, he has come up with another school drama in Dead Poets Society. The movie is set in 1959 in Vermont, at a private boys' school whose repressive response to ideas and sensitivity is challenged by a new English master, who exhorts his students to "Seize the day" (Carpe diem). As the anti-conformist professor whose dedication to instilling a love of literature and poetry into over-privileged and previously uninterested boys leads to tragedy, Robin Williams brilliantly seizes his day, playing a dramatic role with passion and restraint.
- Paris, 7 June: Release of Malenkaya Vera (Little Vera), a Russian film by Vasili Pichul, strring Natalia Negoda. Its Russian title means "little faith," and it is an outspoken portrait of disaffected youth that could not have been made before the new era of glasnost.
- Hollywood, 24 June:
 Sean Connery is 59 and Harrison Ford is 47, but this hasn't stopped Connery from being cast as Indiana Jones' grizzled father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Indy once again tangles with a bunch of Nazis in a chase for the Holy Grail. The two stars strike sparks off each other in the third of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones adventures. Shot in Spain, Italy and Jordan and at Elstree Studios in Britain, the picture boasts a formidable array of sets, props, including no fewer than 7,000 rats and a replica World War I tank which cost over $150,000 to build. In the opening sequence the young Indy is played by the attractive River Phoenix, who played Ford's unhappy son in The Mosquito Coast.
 - New York, 30 June: Following his debut movie She's Gotta Have It, Spike Lee's latest, Do the Right Thing, is as hip, hot and accomplished a picture as is likely to be seen this year: an angry, funny, uncompromising commentary on the state of the nation seen as a slice of life in Brooklyn, where the residents of one block swirl in and out of Sal's (Danny Aiello) pizzeria that is the focal point of the street. The pace and the uneasy racial dynamics (black-white, Asian-black and black-black) are shrewdly stepped up as the summer temperatures and tempers soar to a shocking climax, acknowledging that people, when pushed, choose sides. The talented Lee also plays the pivotal role. His excellent cast includes Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, Robin Harris, John Savage, Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez and Martin Lawrence.
- New York, 6 July: Errol Morris is reportedly "hurt and upset" by the case being brought against him by Randall Dale Adams, the man he helped to release from Death Row. Adams, who has received six-figure offers from publishers and film companies, is trying to regain the rights to his story.
- Los Angeles, 7 July: The recent run of fatal helicopter accidents on movie sets abroad is worrying industry professionals. Some say the insurance companies used by producers bear a share of the responsibility. According to a spokesman from West Coast Helicopters, pilots involved in accidents were often not stunt-qualified.
 - Los Angeles, 10 July:
 Mel Blanc, the actor-voice specialist, has died. Beginning in radio in the 1930s, Blanc improvised the sound of Jack Benny's Maxwell when he noticed that the record player that provided the sound effect wasn't turned on. From then on, Benny made Blanc's sputtering car part of the program. This helped move Blanc more into the public eye. He provided the voices for over 3,000 animated cartoons during his 60-year career, including virtually the entire pantheon of Warner Bros. characters: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, and Tweety and Sylvester. Originally, voice artists were not given screen credit on animated cartoons. After Blanc was turned down for a raise at Warners, they added his name as "Vocal Characterizationist" to the credits as a compromise. Not only did it give greater credit to voice artists from then on, it further increased Blanc's recognition by the public. While in a coma after a cataclysmic atuomobile accident in 1962, doctors unsuccessfully tried to get Blanc to talk. Finally, a doctor, who was also a fan of his cartoon characters, asked Mel, "Bugs? Bugs Bunny? Are you there?". Mel responded, in Bugs Bunny's voice, "What's up, Doc?" After talking with several other "characters", the doctors eventually led Blanc out of his coma. Shortly before his death, the executives of Time-Warner (owners of Warner Bros.) asked Blanc if there was anything, literally anything, that they could give him to thank him for his life's body of work. He asked for, and received, a Ford Edsel. The epitaph on his headstone at Hollywood Forever Cemetery reads, "That's All Folks!"
 - New York, 12 July: In Rob Reiner's new comedy, bouncy blonde Meg Ryan is the "modern" girl who believes that she and Billy Crystal can be friends without being lovers. Crystal, on the other hand, believes that men and women can't enjoy a friendship without sex getting in the way. When Harry Met Sally... is a variation on the time-honored Hollywood theme in which the leading man and woman spend the entire film finding an excuse not to fall in love before tumbling into each other's arms in the final reel. The stand-out scene in this likeable movie occurs in a deli where Ryan demonstrates beyond a doubt that it's possible to fake an orgasm of thermonuclear proportions.
- London, 25 July: Actor Rex Harrison was knighted today at Buckingham Palace. Asked how he felt during the investiture he replied, "It was a marvelous moment kneeling there and getting tapped on the shoulder."
- Hollywood, 31 July: Allegations that actor Rob Lowe made a pornographic home-movie with an underage girl have shocked fans of the man until now considered Hollywood's hottest property.
- Los Angeles, 18 August:
 Brian De Palma's Casualties of War intrudes into Oliver Stone territory. It does so with some power and in spectacular locations, but has probably come too late in the spate to be taken as seriously as its make would wish. Like the war on which it focuses, the picture is uncompromisingly horrible, as soldier Michael J. Fox attempts to protect a captive Vietnamese girl (Thuy Thu Le) from his cronies who, incited by the near-psychopathic Sean Penn, are intent on rape. Despite the usual criticisms made against De Palma, he tells his terrible tale without a trace of salaciousness.
- Prague, 23 August: Former child star Shirley Temple Black arrived in Prague today. She appears to have already won the hearts of Czechoslovakians, who gave her a warm welcome at a party held in her honor. Black is here as the United States ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
 - Los Angeles, 13 September: Gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer, named one of the world's 10 most beautiful women by Harper's, scores a bull's-eye with The Fabulous Baker Boys. They are the real-life brothers Beau and Jeff Bridges, here playing double piano in the lower echelons of the hotel and nightclub circuit. Deciding to hire a vocalist to revive their dying act, they land themselves with Suzie Diamond (Pfeiffer), former small-time whore with a great line of wisecracks, whose sexy presence plays havoc with the brothers' relationship. Pfeiffer, ably supported and singing in an attractively off-key voice, sets the screen alight.
- New York, 15 September:
 After being wildly miscast as a fur trapper in the disastrous Revolution, Al Pacino withdrew from films. He consoled himself with stage work and, he now admits, heavy drinking. Now, four years on, he's back and in great form, playing the morose middle-aged cop cast adrift on a Sea of Love with explosively sexy murder suspect Ellen Barkin. The movie looks to be equally notable for establishing the immensely talented Barkin, who made her screen debut in the 1982 Diner, as a top-rank star. For his part, Pacino has told the press, "I'm coming back, out of hibernation. It's going to be interesting to see how the audiences accept me back."
- Cannes, 5 October: Director, former critic and a co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma Jacques Doniol-Valcroze has died of a heart attack.
 - New York, 13 October: After two bleak dramas, September and Another Woman, both of which failed to appeal to the public or the critics, Woody Allen has come up with a more accessible but no less bleak film in Crimes and Misdemeanors. As the title suggests, the movie has Dostoevskian undertones with two stories running concurrently. One is serious, where adultery leads to murder; the other treats adultery in a more flippant manner. Though there is merely a tenuous link between them, Allen manages to keep them both in the air simultaneously. The film is perhaps one of the director's most pessimistic statements, where evil remains unchallenged (in the form of the tortured figure of opthalmologist Martin Landau), and mediocrity triumphs (in the form of the smarmy egocentric TV personality, Alan Alda). The cast includes Allen himself in on of his most archetypical nebbish roles, Mia Farrow, whom he lusts after, Anjelica Huston (as Landau's mistress-victim) and Sam Waterston as a rabbi going blind, whose spiritual insight is contrasted with Landau's moral murkiness.
- New York, 8 November:
 Kenneth Branagh, the Boy Wonder of English theater, steps into the seven league boots of Laurence Olivier to direct himself in the title role of Shakespeare's Henry V. To reclaim the play from its associations with Olivier's World War II film, he plays the victor of Agincout as a calculating bully, and the battle itself is mounted as a mud-clogged slogging match reminiscent of World War I. It's a brave effort, but Branagh is no Olivier, and an element of strain clings to his assault on the play's great exhortatory passages before the siege of Barfleur and the moment of truth at Agincourt.
- Paris, 8 November: Pop singer Vanessa Paradis makes her screen debut in Jean-Claude Brisseau's Noce blanche.
- Sarasota, 19 November: Audrey Hepburn has opened the first Festival of French Films to be held in the U.S. The directors and actors of many of the films are present to introduce their work to the public. The French cinema industry is hoping this will open new doors (at present French films represent only one percent of the market here). A special homage was paid to René Clément and Jeanne Moreau.
 - Hollywood, 25 November: The most holy sanctuary of American culture -- film production -- has fallen to the Japanese giant Sony. The corporation has acquired Columbia Pictures for $3 billion. Producers Jon Peters and Peter Gruber are to head the Japanese-owned studio. The industry is reeling under the shock of this news.
- Paris, 6 December: Valmont, the latest film from Milos Forman, has opened here. This is the second adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' 18th-century epistolary novel to open here this year; the first was Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons.
- Los Angeles, 10 December: Fox's blacker-than-black comedy, The War of the Roses, took the top spot this week, out-grossing National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
 - New York, 20 December: In Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, Tom Cruise has switched off his constant grin and disappeared beneath straggly hair and a mustache to play the wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. Kovic, who was crippled in Vietnam, collaborated with Stone on the screenplay, which takes him from gung-ho patriot to anti-war activist. Cruise is superb as Kovic, banishing the sour taste left by his self-satisfied performance in the hawkish Top Gun. Stone claims, "It's the biggest film I've ever shot. It has about 170 speaking parts and covers about 30 years of life. It's about a boy coming of age in my generation, going to war and coming back, and what America was going through in that period... I wrote it 10 years ago, straight after Platoon... I never thought I'd get a chance to do it."
- New York, 20 December: Director Costa-Gavras has turned his attention to the issue of Nazism. His newly-released film Music Box concerns a woman lawyer who, defending her own father against charges of Nazi war crimes, must confront a dark and disturbing past. Jessica Lange plays the role.
- Hollywood, 31 December:
 The recent growth in movie attendance in the U.S. and the rise in average ticket prices -- up from $4.11 last year to $4.45 -- means that the total box-office receipts for 1989 have topped the $5 billion mark for the very first time. The biggest hit of the year was the Guber-Peters production of Batman. Released by Warner Bros. and shown simultaneously in 2,850 theaters in June, the picture, starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson (as the Joker) and Kim Basinger, and directed by Tim Burton, set several records in the first weeks of its opening, and continued strong throughout the peak summer months. The picture delivers the goods despite an occasionally spotty script, giving the caped crusader a thorough overhaul in keeping with the crime fighter's evolution in DC Comics. Triumphant production design by Anton Furst turns Batman into a visual feast, and Burton brilliantly establishes a darkly mythic approach to Batman's legacy. Danny Elfman's score propels the action with bold, muscular verve.
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2 February - Los Angeles, CA, 
5 October -