- Hollywood, 4 January: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that a record high of 37 countries have submitted entries for the Foreign Language Film Oscar® this year.
- New York, 6 January: The National Critics Association today voted Martin Scorsese as best director for GoodFellas, which was also judged best film. Jeremy Irons was best actor for his portrayal of Claus von Bülow in Warner Bros. Reversal of Fortune, while the award for best actress went to Anjelica Huston for her performances in The Witches and The Grifters, which also won best supporting actress for Annette Bening. Aki Kaurismaki's Ariel was voted best foreign film.
- Paris, 9 January:
 It is fitting that the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, himself a Resistance fighter, who made his reputation with his war trilogy, should return to his country's darkest days with Korczak. It tells the true story of Dr. Korczak, director of a Jewish orphanage, who is forced to transfer the home to the Warsaw ghetto when the Nazis invade Poland in 1939. Three years later, he and the children are on their way to Treblinka. But the director, admitting that he could not come to terms with the reality, imagines the children's souls being released from the train and able to romp in the countryside.
 - Boston, 18 January: Franco Zeffirelli's choice of Mel Gibson for Hamlet, the greatest role in the English language other than King Lear, is vindicated by a competent, thoughtful and attractive performance that has vigor and humor. Gibson, neither noble youth nor persuasive scholar, is a tad stolid when soliloquizing, but impressive when his blood is up or when feigning madness. An extravagantly coiffed Glenn Close looks ridiculously young to have hatched this prince and much of the direction is uninspired, but Paul Scofield's majestic Ghost brings class to a handsome but disappointing film.
- Los Angeles, 25 January:
 For his first film set in America, British director Stephen Frears chose The Grifters, adapted from a relentlessly cynical, downbeat and fascinating thriller by Jim Thompson. Set in a sylized Southern California (drifting between the 1950s and the 1980s), this is a subtle and stylish film noir about three con artists or "grifters." They are played to perfection by Annette Bening, a queen spider attracting men into her web; a blonde Anjelica Huston, the tough and fatalistic old hand; and John Cusack as her son, caught between them, hostile to mother, but following in her footsteps.
- Utah, 28 January: Todd Haynes' Poison, an unconventional three-part drama inspired by the writings of Jean Genet, overcame divided opinion at this year's Sundance Film Festival to win the grand jury prize. Haynes first gained notoriety with his widely acclaimed film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. The film, which employed Barbie and Ken dolls to dramatize the singer's tragic death in 1982 from anorexia nervosa, has since been withdrawn due to its illegal use of original Carpenters music.
- New York, 30 January: According to the movie magazine Premiere, three couples paid the sum of $14,000 to have breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn, the allusion being to the 1961 film by Blake Edwards. The money will go to UNICEF for which Miss Hepburn is a roving ambassador and tireless fundraiser.
- Burkino Faso, 2 February: The jury of the 12th Pan-African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, presided over by Malian director Souleymane Cissé, has awarded its main prize to Tilai, by Idrissa Ouedraogo.
- Los Angeles, 8 February:
 "Romance does exist deep in the heart of L.A.," says nutty television weather forecaster Steve Martin in L.A. Story, a romantic comedy set in the city with no heart. Martin, who wrote the script, does a series of amusing comic turns, including a balletic glide through the County Museum, as he pursues visiting English journalist Victoria Tennant. But despite some satiric cracks at the modish eccentricities of L.A., both British director Mick Jackson and the star cannot resist adding a confusing dose of whimsy, such as a talking freeway information sign that plays cupid to the hero.
 - New York, 14 February: "Believe me, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head," Bureau profiler Scott Glenn warns rookie FBI agent Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. But Dr. Hannibal "the Cannibal," a once eminent psychiatrist turned serial killer, as brilliantly portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, is bound to stay inside audiences' heads. Tautly directed by Jonathan Demme, this gripping and eerie psychological thriller largely manages to avoid sensationalism. The best scenes are the confontations between the caged Hopkins and Foster, she regarding him with morbid fascination and he unblinkingly playing an intricate game of cat and mouse with her. Based on the best-selling novel by Thomas Harris, Lambs is not our first introduction to the creepy Dr. Lecter. In 1986, Michael Mann adapted Harris' novel Red Dragon to make Manhunter, with Brian Cox playing the flesh-eating shrink and William L. Petersen as the FBI agent who enlists his help to catch another serial killer.
- Los Angeles, 28 February:
 Christian Brando, aged 33, has been convicted of the murder of Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of his half-sister, Cheyenne. Through William Kunstler, his lawyer, Marlon Brando's son by his first wife Anna Kashfi pleaded not guilty. He has always maintained that the killing, which took place at his father's California home on 16 May last year, was an accident, and that there was no criminal intent on his part. He explained that the gun that killed Drollet had been fired involuntarily during a struggle after Christian had demanded that Drollet, who had been mistreating the pregnant Cheyenne, leave the house. Marlon Brando, who took the witness stand, defended his son passionately, with tears in his eyes. The jury, however, remained unmoved by the famous actor's words, and Christian was sentenced to 10 years in prison for voluntary manslaughter.
 - New York, 7 March: Pauline Kael, the often controversial film critic, retires this month after 23 years as the regular critic for the New Yorker. Her last review appeared in the 11 February issue. Kael, whose outspokenness caused a few difficult moments in her early days, was fired from McCall's in 1965 for calling The Sound of Music "The Sound of Money." Although considered a role model for a new generation of serious film critics, she could turn a phrase with the best of them. On Kevin Costner and Dances With Wolves, she quipped, "Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head..."
- Paris, 13 March:
 It is obviously too soon to expect 55-year-old Bertrand Blier to have settled down and renounced the style that has contributed to his originality -- a poetic disenchantment with life, derision and insolence, which always prevents his films from being gratuitously vulgar. Thus Blier's latest film, 'Merci la vie' (Thank You, Life) -- in the spirit of his youthful works like Les Valseuses (Going Places, 1974) -- is probably his most anti-conformist film in attitude as well as form. It follows two very different young girls on a testing voyage of discovery. Camille, a naive schoolgirl meets an intiguing influence in Joëlle, a slightly older and much more experienced spirit. Camille follows her new friend through the discovery of sex and the darker side of life. As the film progresses Camille discovers AIDS and the fear that she may have picked up the disease in her early encounters. Both Charlotte Gainsbourg as Camille and Anouk Grinberg as Joëlle are remarkable.
 - Paris, 13 March: The record for the number of Césars obtained by one film has been broken by Cyrano de Bergerac, which won 10 awards. These included best director (Jean-Paul Rappeneau), best actor (Gérard Depardieu), best cinematographer (Pierre Lhomme), best supporting actor (Jacques Weber) and, naturally, best film. At the ceremony, actor Richard Bohringer presented the César for best actress to Anne Parillaud for her exciting performance in the title role of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita. The recipient burst into tears, which were wiped away discreetly by Besson.
- Hollywood, 25 March:
 Kevin Costner, a good-looking, dependable and amiable 35-year-old actor, astonished everybody by producing, directing and starring in Dances With Wolves, the film that cleaned up on most of this year's Oscars®. Costner himself played Lt. John J. Dunbar, an army officer who asks to be posted to the post-Civil War western frontier. Living alone at "the furthest outpost of the realm," he gradually earns the trust of the Sioux Indians. Renamed Dances With Wolves, he joins their tribe, but is brutally treated by a newly arrived cavalry detail. As a debut director, Costner displayed extraordinary confidence, handling the big scenes of this three-hour epic, and the more inimate ones, with real feeling for the medium. It also comes closer than most commercial movies to an accurate re-creation of the Native American way of life. Dances With Wolves won the best film, director, writing, cinematography, editing, sound and music scoring awards, but the acting Oscars® went to Jeremy Irons (Best Actor, Reversal of Fortune), Kathy Bates (Best Actress, Misery), Joe Pesci (Best Supporting Actor, GoodFellas), and Whoopi Goldberg (Best Supporting Actress, Ghost).
 - Hollywood, 5 April: Ex-producer Julia Phillips, once one of Hollywood's brightest stars (she was the first woman producer to win a Best Picture Oscar®) before her drug habit sent her on a downward spiral, is enjoying the sweet taste of revenge. Her autobiographical bestseller You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, already in its fourth printing after barely a month on the shelf, has been raising temperatures in Tinseltown with its biting disclosures of le tout Hollywood.
- Paris, 17 April: Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, who have already directed numerous video clips and advertisements as well as the astonishing short film Le Bunker de la dernière rafale, have released their first feature film Delicatessen. A strange story that mixes cannibalism with poetic realism, it stars Dominique Piñon and Jean-Claude Dreyfus and looks to be causing something of a sensation.
- Paris, 22 April: A UNESCO report has revealed that American films are flooding African screens. In Egypt, for example, American films have captured 86 percent of the market.
- New York, 10 May:
 From Canada comes filmmaker Cynthia Scott's award-winning The Company of Strangers (aka Strangers in Good Company and Le Fabuleux gang des sept), a semi-documentary that brings unalloyed, life-enhancing delight. Seven elderly women, on a day trip in the lovely countryside outside Québec, are stranded when their bus breaks down. They take refuge in a derelict farm, where they must live off their wits and courage, and pass the time telling stories of their own lives. Improvised from the raw material of the real-life, non-acting cast, this is not a talking heads picture, but a warm, optimistic tribute to the human spirit and old age. Director Scott shared an Oscar® with Adam Symansky for the 1983 documentary short subject Flamenco at 5:15.
 - Paris, 15 May: Jacques Demy was nine years old at the outbreak of the Second World War. Brought up in Nantes, the young boy occupied his spare time making puppets. Soon after, he discovered the cinema, and began to make films with a little camera. These childhood memories of the director of Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg have been re-created in a magical manner by his widow, Agnès Varda, for a film that's called Jacquot de Nantes. Varda has also included a series of moving interviews with her ailing husband, who died last November, a short while after the film was completed.
- Cannes, 20 May:
 By carrying off the Golden Palm, the director's prize and the best actor award, Barton Fink has succeeded in doing what no other film has ever done in the history of the Cannes Festival. However, admired as Joel and Ethan Coen's American movie was, a number of critics considered that making it a triple winner was going a bit too far, especially as it was in competition with Jacques Rivette's La Belle noiseuse and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Podwójne zycie Weroniki (The Double Life of Véronique). Nevertheless, the former gained the Grand Prix, and the latter the best actress award for Irene Jacob in the double title role. But Barton Fink impressed the jury, under Roman Polanski, with its skillful mixture of the sordid and poetic, the real and the unreal, in a Kafkaesque vision of 1940s Hollywood. Thirty-four-year-old John Turturro, remembered as the racist pizza man in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), deserved his best actor award for the role of a serious playwright hired by a big movie studio to write a screenplay for a wrestling picture, and finding himself being drawn deeper and deeper into a nightmarish situation. It's the fourth and best feature by the Coen brothers, Ethan (producer) and Joel (director).
- Philippines, 22 May: Lino Brocka, the bête noire of the Marcos regime, has been killed in a car accident. His last film, Orapronobis (aka Fight for Us and Les Insoumis), was presented as part of the official selection at the Festival of Cannes in 1989.
 - New York, 24 May: Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise, scripted by Callie Khouri as a right-on variation of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, may or may not be a feminist manifesto for the 1990s. But it is an opportunity, brilliantly seized, for Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis to exchange a beguiling mix of womanly wisecracks and emotion as bosom buddies, on the lam from abusive men and the law in a liberating misadventure of crime and self-discovery. Few men who wish to be well though of will dare to demur as angry women around them cheer on as Thelma and Louise violently, hilariously, and movingly take charge.
- Toronto, 10 June: David Cronenberg has begun shooting Naked Lunch, adapted from William Burroughs' book about the sex and drugs culture. Until now it has been considered an impossible work to adapt for the screen.
- New York, 14 June:
 Having seen off the dreary competition from a more modestly budgeted version of the Robin Hood legend starring Patrick Bergin, Kevin Costner, sounding more like the outlaw of Malibu than of Sherwood Forest, arrives in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. This is lavish piffle, in which Costner -- with Morgan Freeman curiously in tow -- takes on Alan Rickman's scene-stealing, dementedly camp Sheriff of Nottingham, wins Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's feisty Maid Marian, and turns a rag-tag group, including Christian Slater, into a lean, mean, arrow-shooting machine for some rousing rebellion and action. Some may sneer at the period and accent gaffes, and lament the lack of Errol Flynn romanticism, but this is a fun swashbuckler for the 90s.
 - Paris, 19 June: Winner of the Caméra d'Or prize at Cannes this year, Toto le héros (Toto the Hero) is a strangely poetic, humorous and melancholy film. Its young director, the Belgian Jaco Van Dormael, has constructed a fascinating puzzle of a plot, which follows the lives of two men, Thomas and Albert, born on the same day. The former, dissatisfied with his mournful existence, and envying the latter's secure and happy life, is convinced that they were given to the wrong parents at birth, and is determined to revenge himself upon Albert.
- London, 21 June:
 Abel Ferrara, an independent New York filmmaker whose rough, tough forays into sleazy backstreets and their even sleazier inhabitants have a weirdly baroque immediacy reminiscent of certain underground styles, is famed as the perpetrator of the notorious The Driller Killer (1979). That movie is banned in Britain, where Ferrara is otherwise not well known, though he began nibbling at the mainstream with the so-so Fear City (1984), that starred Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams and Melanie Griffith, and the reasonably well-received Cat Chaser (1989), with Peter Weller, Kelly McGillis and Charles Durning. Now, leaving his unknown actors (e.g. the wonderfully named Zoë Tamerlis played MS 45 -- Angel of Vengeance, a particularly crude and brutal story) and his hand-held camera behind him, he has made King of New York, which is having a mixed reception here. A charismatic Christopher Walken, the "king" of the title, is a throrougly rotten apple, bent on controlling the city's drug trade by any means, including murder. Ferrara's supporting cast includes David Caruso, Laurence Fishburne, Wesley Snipes and Steve Buscemi. The picture is nasty, hollow and overblown, but stylish and glossy. For Ferrara followers, in going big-budget, this unique chronicler of the Manhattan underbelly has lost his unique vision.
 - Los Angeles, 12 July: John Singleton describes his impressive directorial debut, Boyz N the Hood, as a film about "boys becoming men," which pleads for "African-American men to take more responsibility for raising their children, especially the boys." Directed with bold certainty, it is as much a portrayal of urban gang warfare in South Central L.A. as a romantic elegy to the stable patriarchal unit. Singleton addresses his film mainly to young black men, urging them (in an unpreachy tone) to become the better fathers of the future. The director-screenwriter is wonderfully served by a fine cast who do justice to an intelligent script. Larry (Laurence) Fishburne has the central role of Furious Styles, the father of Tre Styles, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., who is drawn into a black gang. The real surprise, however, is the performance of the rapper Ice Cube, who plays Doughboy, a doleful, heavyset tearaway, who avenges his friend Ricky's (Morris Chestnut) death by shooting his three killers. As can be expected, the boisterous movie has equally boisterous music on the soundtrack, including a few tracks by Ice Cube himself.
- Sarasota, 28 July:
 Popular actor Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) was arrested here yesterday for indecent behavior in an adult movie theater. Pee Wee has been a phenomenon with children and adults alike since his wacky debut in TV's "The Pee Wee Herman Show" (1981) and Tim Burton's Pee Wee's Big Adventure in 1985. Reubens developed the cherry-lipped, loveable brat in shrunken grey suit and bow tie as a comedian with the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improvisational group, in 1979.
- Hollywood, 12 August: Dustin Hoffman, who is at present making Hook with Steven Spielberg, has signed a three-year contract with Columbia TriStar.
- New York, 12 August: Jennie Livingston's acclaimed documentary about New York's Harlem drag balls, Paris Is Burning, has come under harsh criticism from the Atlanta-based Christian Film and Television Commission, which seeks to promote "the moral, family-oriented, Judeo-Christian viewpoint." Prestige, the Miramax Films division distributing the film, has decided to counter the CFTC attack by handing out petitions over the weekend at the 26 theaters currently showing the film.
 - London, 16 August: Already ecstatically received in the U.S., where it is being billed as the "thinking person's Ghost," the home-grown British, BBC-financed Truly, Madly, Deeply has its London release. Marking an accomplished feature debut by its writer-director Anthony Minghella, the film's resemblance to Ghost begins and ends with the fact that the dead (of sudden but natural causes) lover of the grief-stricken girl he has left behind reappears in her life as a ghost. After than, despite much humor, the film is about coming to terms with pain and loss. It's charming, tender, tearjerking and, as cast and played (Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman star), truly, madly English.
- London, 30 August: Opening of Peter Greenway's Prospero's Books, a loose adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, starring John Gielgud as Prospero. Michael Nyman has again composed the music for Greenway.
- Paris, 4 September:
 Just as Henri-Georges Clouzot once did with Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso), 1956), in which he filmed the Spanish master in the process of painting, so Jacques Rivette, in his latest film La Belle noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker), has attempted to capture the mystery of creation by observing an artist at work. Rivette has concentrated on Frenhofer(Michel Piccoli), a fictional painter who has retired to Provençc with his wife. When a young artist (David Bursztein) visits him with his girlfriend (Emmanuelle Béart), Frenhofer decides to start working again on a painting he has abandoned, "la Belle noiseuse." And he wants the girlfriend as model. Restarting the creative process changes life for all involved; it is a struggle for truth, life and sense, and where the limits of art are -- or whether art is limitless. Piccoli portrays the artist with great conviction. The film reveals the ambivalent sado-masochistic relationship existing between Frenhofer and his model, and the manner in which nudity is used in painting, and by extension, on screen. Jane Birkin plays Piccoli's wife, trying to understand her husband's artistic process. The best scene is the meticulous preparations the artist goes through before brush touches canvas.
 - Venice, 14 September: The televised award ceremony at the close of the 48th Venice Film Festival was held on a temporary platform set up in Saint Mark's Square, on which stood a huge plywood Golden Lion. The actual Golden Lion, made of gilded bronze, was awarded to the Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov for Urga (Close to Eden), a visually stunning film from the USSR made mostly with French money. It is an enjoyably boisterous folk comedy set on the Mongolian steppes, with a simple cultural message. The Silver Lion was shared by three pictures from different corners of the world: Philippe Garrel's poetic J'entends plus la guitare (I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar) from France, Yimou Zhang's Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Raise the Red Lantern), a remarkable tale of female rivalry from China, and Terry Gilliam's haunting The Fisher King from the U.S. This last is set in contemporary New York City, but adopts a medieval quest theme, with two down-and-outs (Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams) as a modern knight and his fool. Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, in which 20-year-old River Phoenix won the best actor prize for his poignant portrait of a lonely, narcoleptic gay husler, is tenuously based on Shakespeare's Henry IV plays. Adding to the range of nations that left Venice with prizes was Great Britain, whose Tilda Swinton won the best actress award for her role as Queen Isabella in Derek Jarman's version of Christopher Marlowe's classical tragedy, Edward II.
- London, 4 October:
 In the bleak postwar London of the early 1950s, Derek Bentley, an 18-year-old youth of low IQ, subject to epilepsy, became friendly with 16-year-old Chris Craig, a delinquent on the fringes of the petty criminal underworld. The liaison led to an attempted robbery, in the course of which the boys were apprehended and Craig shot a policeman. Before he fired, Bentley, reportedly, shouted "Let him have it," meaning, give the gun to the cop. The jury found both boys guilty of murder, but recommended mercy for Bentley. However, since Craig was too young to hang, the recommendation was ignored and, despite repeated protests from the public and crusading members of Parliament, Bentley went to the gallows. The attempts to clear Bentley still go on, and this unequivocal and appalling miscarriage of British justice is recounted in Peter Medak's Let Him Have It. A brilliant cast (headed by Christopher Eccleston, Tom Courtenay and Eileen Atkins as the Bentleys) plays out the drama in a faultless period re-creation of the time and, if the film is harrowing, it is also thoroughly gripping and certainly to be applauded.
- Los Angeles, 6 October: Elizabeth Taylor has married for the eighth time. Her new husband, Larry Fortenski, is a builder whom she met while undergoing treatment of alcoholism. The wedding took place at Michael Jackson's ranch, Neverland.
 - Paris, 8 October: It seems miraculous that Leos Carax's Les Amants du Pont Neuf (Lovers on the Ninth Bridge) has finally seen the light of day, after all the problems that beset it. They began when the leading actor Denis Levant sprained his wrist. Then it was found that there was no possibility of shooting the picture on the Pont Neuf, so it had to be rebuilt elsewhere. When the budget swelled enormously, the original producer retreated. Finally, the film was completed at a cost of 200 million francs. This richly romantic and spectacular movie tells of two outsiders, who have sought refuge on this famous Parisian landmark. The stars of Carax's previous film, Mauvais sang (The Night Is Young, 1986), Lavant, as a young vagrant, and Juliette Binoche, as a painter trying to cope with encroaching blindness, make a splendidly passionate couple.
- Paris, 30 October:
 Haggard, exhausted and on the verge of wasting away, the Vincent Van Gogh of Maurice Pialat's biopic, Van Gogh, is more of a ragged tramp than a great master. Picking up Van Gogh's life story in the months before he committed suicide in 1890, Pialat avoids all the usual ear-slicing mythmaking in favour of a portrait of the artist as a melancholic old man. Unlike other, more famous, Van Gogh movies, Pialat spends remarkably little time watching the artist at work. Instead, he charts his antagonistic relationships with those around him, including his art dealer brother Theo (Bernard Lecoq), kindly patron Dr Gachet (Gérard Séty) and Gachet's daughter, Marguerite (Alexandra London), who falls for the painter's unbalanced charms. On the few occasions that Pialat contrives to let us watch the artist at his easel, Jacques Dutronc's phenomenal intensity comes to the fore. He wrestles with each stroke of the brush, beating the paint into submission with bestial ferocity, before dismissively abandoning each canvas as "smudges that will never be worth a cent". The actor discovers a tragic irony underlying Van Gogh's sense of overwhelming failure as, surrounded by cowards and weaklings too afraid or stupid to admit to his greatness, he hounds himself towards the inevitable end, destroying everything in his wake and little realising the importance of his work. What makes Van Gogh so remarkable, though, is Pialat and Dutronc's refusal to fit this suicidal descent into the usual rhythms of the biopic. Conjuring a performance that's constantly full of surprises, Dutronc flirts with his character's despair, swinging from depression to elation with bewildering speed. It's a performance that makes Van Gogh worthy of being called a masterpiece in its own right. -- Jamie Russell, BBC
- Paris, 9 November: Yves Montand has died of cardiac arrest a few days after he had acted out a scene in which his on-screen character dies of cardiac arrest in Jean-Jacques Beineix's IP5: L'île aux pachydermes. It has been suggested that the great 70-year-old actor-singer's death was hastened by what he had to endure during the shooting, such as having to dive into a cold lake. On his way to the hospital, Montand said, "I know I'm a goner, but it's not serious. I've had a terrific life."
 - New York, 13 November: Martin Scorsese's surprising remake of the 1962 Cape Fear affords a masterly demonstration of his technical virtuosity, but eschews the creepy realism of the original to play to contemporary taste for overwrought horror. The result is stlylistically brilliant and harrowing. The basic plot remains the same: vengeful ex-con (Robert De Niro) mounts a terror campaign against the lawyer (Nick Nolte) he blames for his imprisonment, targeting the man's wife and daughter (Jessica Lange, and remarkable newcomer Juliette Lewis). J. Lee Thompson's film was simple good vs. bad; Scorsese opts for more complex themes of guilt and sin, with a dysfunctional family playing into the con's hands. De Niro's tatooed wacko, in contrast to Robert Mitchum's easy menace, goes spectacularly over the top en route to the finale, but the performances and psychology are as mesmerizing as they are repugnant. Nice touches are cameos from the original stars, Mitchum and Gregory Peck, and Bernard Herrmann's memorable score, rearranged by Elmer Bernstein.
- Hollywood, 17 November:
 It took Walt Disney studios 30 years to venture back into the territory of the classic fairy tale with The Little Mermaid (1989). Its success convinced Walt's heirs to put even more effort and money into Beauty and the Beast. Derived from the story by Mme. Leprince de Beaumont, the animated feature is a throwback in the best sense of the word -- its melodious score alone is reminiscent of the golden age of musicals -- but it is also very much a product of the 90s. For example, the ballroom sequence features the first computer-generated color background to be both animated and fully dimensional. The characters also have depth, especially the gutsy Belle (voiced by Paige O'Hara) and the poignant Beast (voiced by Robby Benson). Richard White voices and sings the vain Gaston. Character voices for Belle's array of talking, singing artifact-friends include Jerry Orbach (Lumière), Angela Lansbury (Mrs. Potts), Jo Anne Worley (Wardrobe) and David Ogden Stiers (Cogsworth/Narrator).
- Los Angeles, 25 November: Anton Furst, the special effects designer who won an Academy Award for art direction on Batman (1989) and who developed and designed the holographic light show for the rock group The Who, died yesterday. According to a Columbia spokesman he committed suicide. Because of contractual obligations, Furst was not able to act as art director for the sequel to Batman. He had recently broken up with actress Bevely D'Angelo.
 - New York, 20 December: After taking on the war in Vietnam in Platoon and capitalism in Wall Street, Oliver Stone's new film, JFK, is likely to have more of an impact on American political life. In a brilliant three-hour mixture of real and fictionalized documentary, stylish thriller and courtroom drama, Stone sets out to prove that the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy was not the work of Lee Harvey Oswald, but an attempt at a coup d'etat by members of the "military-industrial complex." Whatever the flaws in the argument -- Pierre Salinger, the White House spokesman under Kennedy, has called the film "a tissue of lies" -- it is put over in an extremely persuasive manner, strong enough to have put the Warren Commission Report into question, and to have created the pressure for the reopening of the investigation. The case is put by Kevin Costner as the idealistic New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who uncovers a nest of vipers during his quest for the truth. A virtual "Who's Who" of Hollywood appear in the film in supporting or cameo roles: Sissy Spacek plays Garrison's long-suffering wife; Gary Oldman is Oswald; Kevin Bacon assists Garrison; Tommy Lee Jones and Joe Pesci are homosexual villains involved with anti-Castro Cubans; and appearances are made by the likes of Edward Asner, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, John Candy, Vincent D'Onofrio, Sally Kirkland, Lolita Davidovich, Donald Sutherland, John Larroquette and Jim Garrison himself, who plays Earl Warren.
- New York, 25 December:
 Following on Yentl, a film of mixed merits that failed at the box office, Barbra Streisand, undaunted, has chosen for her second directing venture material so sprawling and complex as to be considered unfilmable by some. Pat Conroy's best-selling novel, The Prince of Tides, a dark, episodic and epic family saga, concerns the traumatic childhood of a sister and brother, and its effects. She ends up catatonic and hospitalized in New York; he, seemingly happily married, journeys to meet her psychiatrist, also married, and they fall in love. That's the précis version. Streisand plays the shrink, Nick Nolte the unhappy brother. It's a lush, romantic melodrama that, despite faults, succeeds as well as it could have done.
 - New York, 27 December: Producer Jon Avnet directs Fried Green Tomatoes (at the Whistle Stop Cafe), adapted with Carol Sobieski by Fannie Flagg from her own novel. Set in the deepest South, the story uses a long, detailed trip down memory lane by octogenarian Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), to change life in the present for plump, anxious housewife Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates), who befriends her while visiting an old people's home. Ninny's past, concerning one Idgie Threadgoode (marvelously played by Mary Stuart Masterson), is jam-packed with drama, melodrama, humor and sadness. The movie, best described as heartwarming, is a testament to the indominitability of womenfolk, played out in a rich period atmosphere, with terrific landscape, photography and performances by Tandy, Bates, Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker and Cicely Tyson.
|
5 February - Santa Monica, CA, 
