- New York, 6 January: British director Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet was named best film of the year yesterday by the National Society of Film Critics. Best actor went to River Phoenix for his performance as the family-seeking gay hustler in My Own Private Idaho, while best actress was won by Alison Steadman for Life Is Sweet. Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Véronique was voted best foreign film, and Jessie Livingston's Paris Is Burning won best documentary.
- Paris, 10 January:
 Who would have thought that an elegant and intelligent film such as Tous le matins du monde (All the Mornings of the World), about two scarcely known 17th-century musicians, should have attracted such large audiences? There are a number of reasons for the success: the sheer joy of the music-making, the gorgeous costumes and decor, the theme of the striving for perfection, and the performances both musical (by the talented violinist Jordi Savall) and dramatic. Jean-Pierre Marielle plays Sainte Colombe, a virtuoso of the viol da gamba, and two Depardieus (Guillaume, young; Gérard, old) are his pupil Marin Marais.
- Los Angeles, 10 January: Nationwide release of Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, which revolves around six residents from different backgrounds whose lives intertwine in modern-day Los Angeles. They are played by Danny Glover, Kevin Kline, Steve Martin, Mary McDonnell, Mary-Louise Parker and Alfre Woodard, and their performances make this film extremely thought-provoking and entertaining.
- London, 2 February: The House of Lords has taken the BBC to task for deciding to screen Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. The film is judged highly offensive to Christians.
- London, 13 February: Dirk Bogarde was knighted today at Buckingham Palace. Bogarde said it was "a great surprise and a great honor" as he had left England for France 22 years ago, never expecting to return. In 1982 he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Lettres.
 - New York, 14 February: With Wayne's World, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey re-create the goofy metalheads Wayne and Garth so beloved of TV's "Saturday Night Live" viewers, and expand their regular sketches as presenters of a homemade TV chat show into a guided tour of American junk culture. This absurd revel in Heavy Metaldom is haphazardly directed by Penelope Spheris.
- New York, 28 February: Warners releases The Mambo Kings, directed by Arne Glimcher and starring Armand Assante, Antonio Banderas and Cathy Moriarty. In this film, musician brothers Cesar (Assante) and Nestor (Banderas) leave Cuba for America in the 1950s, hoping to hit the top of the Latin music scene. Hot, stylish and sexy, it is adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos.
- Los Angeles, 4 March: Death of Art Babbitt, the master of character animation whose career spanned the early days of sound animation at Terrytoons and Disney. Although he was best known for developing the personality of Goofy, he also worked on such landmark features as Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941).
- New York, 13 March: Merchant-Ivory bring us Howards End, adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from E. M. Forster's novel. Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter play the Schlagels, two free-thinking and philanthropic sisters in England at the beginning of the 20th century. They have encounters with the Wilcoxes, a wealthy family headed by Anthony Hopkins. The younger sister (Carter) is rejected by the son of the wealthy family. The older sister (Thompson) becomes a good friend of the wealthy mother (Vanessa Redgrave), whose most cherished possession is their cottage at Howards End, and wishes fervently that Thompson could live there, as they are kindred spirits. Over the course of years, the older sister marries into the wealthy family, and the rest of the Wilcoxes try to keep her from taking possession of Howards End.
 - Hollywood, 20 March:
 Although the director Paul Verhoeven had to cut certain scenes from Basic Instinct that were considered too violent or erotic for a wide audience, this sexual thriller has reawakened arguments about censorship. Basic Instinct, showing with an R rating which allows adolescents to see it only if accompanied by an adult, has been violently opposed by lesbians, who are depicted as dangerously malicious, while other women object to the uneasy presence of sex-as-violence. However, stars Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone provide a riveting double act in a gripping film. The story revolves around Detective Nick Curran (Douglas), assigned to the case of former rock star and San Francisco nightclub owner Johnny Boz who is found murdered in his bed. Curran has a history of alcoholism and drug abuse although he is clean now. The prime suspect is Catherine Tramell (Stone), an attractive and manipulative novelist who had been seeing Boz for a while. Police psychiatrist Beth Gardner (Jeanne Triplehorn), who happens to be Curran's ex-girlfriend, is brought in on the case when it is discovered that Boz's murder was copied directly from one of Trammell's novels. Curran starts to get too involved and everyone seems to be a suspect.
- Paris, 25 March: Steven Soderbergh, the winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1989 for his debut picture sex, lies and videotape, is in Paris for the French release of his second feature, Kafka, with Jeremy Irons, Theresa Russell and Alec Guinness.
- Los Angeles, 30 March:
 Following directly on the year of the "Wolves," this was the year of the "Lambs," The Silence of the Lambs to be exact, which won five of the main awards, including Best Film. It was a popular winner, especially the Best Actor prize, which was presented to Anthony Hopkins, even though he was the third British star in succession to win it (after Daniel Day-Lewis and Jeremy Irons), and the role was, strictly speaking a supporting one. But his few scenes as Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter were so powerful and unsettling, that he dominated the whole film. His co-star Jodie Foster (Best Actress), in her most mature role yet as an FBI agent seeking his help in tracing a serial killer, revealed toughness without attempting to hide the character's sensitivity. The film also provided a first Oscar® for director Jonathan Demme, who has been up-and-coming for years, and screenwriter Ted Tally. Lambs, therefore, becomes the first film since Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) to take all five top awards. In fact, the only other film to accomplish this sweep of the majors is 1934's It Happened One Night. Supporting acting awards were won by Mercedes Ruehl, for her performance in The Fisher King, and Jack Palance (City Slickers), who performed one-armed push-ups on stage during his acceptance speech.
- New York, 7 April: Ted Turner and Jane Fonda were among the plethora of celebrities present at yesterday's kickoff festivities for the new "50th anniversary" edition of Casablanca at the Museum of Modern Art. All present felt that the film has never looked so good except, perhaps, when it was first shown on 26 November 1942.
 - Los Angeles, 10 April: "Hollywood is afraid of me, I guess. I can't make the kind of films they want to make, and the kind of films I make, they just don't want to make," said Robert Altman in the 1980s. After being in the commercial doldrums for some time, Altman has now made a scintillating critical and box-office comeback with The Player, his revenge on Tinseltown. This brilliantly crafted and wickedly funny movie is a mordant satire on the Hollywood film industry, firing alike on studio executives, spoiled stars, hustling writers, shark-like agents and power players. At its center is Tim Robbins as a bland yet thrusting young studio executive, who reveals the paplable edginess behind the Hollywood smile. Comic asides, acid wit and celebrity cameos thread their way through the enjoyable proceedings as Robbins' attempts to discover who is blackmailing him draw him deeper and deeper into the dark side of the Dream Factory.
- Lisbon, 10 April: Release of A Divina Comédia (The Divine Comedy), a very free adaptation of Dante directed by Manoel de Oliveira, with Maria de Medeiros and Luis Miguel Cintra.
- Paris, 12 April:
 The original agreement to build a Disney theme park in Europe was signed in 1987, but it has taken almost five years to complete this ambitious project. Conceived during the heady days of the late 1980s boom years, the $4.5 billion version of the American Disneyworld, built 25 miles east of Paris, will start off with a heavy burden of debt, though only a fraction of the costs will be carried by the Disney company itself. It is uncertain whether the formula that works so well in sunny California (where the first Disneyland opened in 1955) and Florida will be equally successful in Europe. The new theme park will include some unique experiences (e.g., a castle with a roaring dragon in its dungeon), but will mostly offer American rides in Gallic disguise, like "Dumbo, l'Elephant Volant."
 - Paris, 15 April: Following on the heels of L'Amant (The Lover) and Dien Bien Phu comes Indochine, the best of the recent films dealing with the colonial experience of the French in Vietnam. All three films, which took advantage of being able to shoot in Vietnam, play on a certain nostalgia for the period, while not being uncritical of French rule. L'Amant, based on an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, told of the passionate love affair between a young French girl and a seductive Chinese man. Dien Bien Phu dealt more overtly with the politics, reconstructing the decisive battle in the struggle for Vietnamese independence. Indochine falls between the two other epics, in being the story of a love affair disrupted by political events. The film, which cost 120 million francs, was conceived as a vehicle for the talents of Catherine Deneuve as a powerful colonial landowner who falls for a young officer, but loses him to her young adopted daughter. The indomitable Deneuve, never better, fights to preserve her love and save her land from destruction, and gradually comes to understand the Vietnamese point of view. Director Régis Wargnier has made splendid use of the exotic landscapes of the country as a setting for the romance.
- Hollywood, 30 April: After Bram Stoker's Dracula, due for U.S. release in August, Francis Ford Coppola is planning to make a new version of Pinocchio, mixing live-action with cartoon characters.
- Berlin, 16 May: Marlene Dietrich, who died a week ago at her Paris apartment, has been buried in Berlin, the city where she was born 93 years ago. At the funeral, a small but vociferous group of Germans protested because they considered her a traitor. The screen legend had not left her apartment since 1980, although the reclusive star allowed Maximilian Schell to enter in order to interview her for a documentary called Marlene in 1983. However, she refuesed point blank to appear before the camera. The last time Dietrich was seen on screen was in the disastrous Just a Gigolo (1978), opposite David Bowie.
- New York, 22 June:
 Exactly three years since Batman topped the U.S. box office, Batman Returns has opened here and is already set to be one of the major hits of this year. With Tim Burton again directing and Michael Keaton reprising the title role, the stunts, sets and spectacular effects look to outdo those of the earlier film, and have had the benefit of a budget estimated at well over $50 million. An additional $20 million is being spent on advertising, including merchandising and licensing deals, notably with Coca-Cola and McDonalds. As with the first movie, the real stars are the villains, especially Danny DeVito's Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's irresistibly sexy Cat Woman.
- Hollywood, 2 July: Universal has decided to change the title and defer the release of Walter Hill's film Looters, with the rappers from the groups Ice-T and Ice Cube. The studio wants to avoid any connection with the riots that have just shaken Los Angeles.
 - Los Angeles, 10 July: Muscles from Brussels Jean-Claude Van Damme and Swedish Meatball Dolph Lundgren meet as adversaries in Universal Soldier, a surprisingly enjoyable mix of sci-fi, martial arts and mayhem. The twosome are among U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam but revived years later as genetically altered zombie warriors in a secret program to creat elite commandos. Naturally, it all goes wrong, memories return, and Van Damme's sensitive good guy is on the run from psychopathic Lundgren, once his nemesis in 'Nam. This drivel is a strong pointer to what sells right now, but it does make agreeably hunky hokum for a bloodthirsty Saturday night.
- Los Angeles, 31 July:
 "I don't want to become one of the living dead in Beverly Hills," says plastic surgeon Bruce Willis in Robert Zemeckis' new film, Death Becomes Her. Using elements of the Zombie movie and camp melodrama -- the rivalry between two ambitious women -- the picture is an attempt to satirize the West Coast craze for youth and beauty. The rivals are novelist Goldie Hawn and actress Meryl Streep, who each take a magic rejuvenation potion supplied to them by Isabella Rossellini with bizarre results. The special effects win the day, but Streep and Hawn are deliciously bitchy.
- Arizona, 1 August: Veteran movie poster artist Robert Peak, who created key art for films such as West Side Story and My Fair Lady, died of a brain hemorrhage at his home yesterday.
- New York, 2 August: Ephraim Katz, the sole author of the colossal critical-historical reference book, The Encyclopedia of Film (1979), died today.
 - New York, 7 August: If Unforgiven really proves to be the last Western from the man who can be credited with keeping the genre alive, Clint Eastwood, it's a grand one on which to ride out. The film is dark, gripping, and embraces complex themes, with Eastwood playing a weathered, reformed killer reluctantly going after the bounty offered by a town's whores in order to avenge one of their number's mutitlation by drunken cowboys. The film is at its most fascinating in its revisionist approach to the myths of the Old West, contrasting its glorification in penny dreadful novellas with its ugly realities. Superbly shot (by Jack N. Green) and uniformly well-acted by a splendid cast (including Morgan Freeman, Jaimz Woolvett and Richard Harris), it's a fine piece of craftsmanship from Eastwood the director, with Gene Hackman taking performance honors as a brutal sheriff. Ironically, the element that gives pause is Eastwood's own enigmatic character, his professed loss of appetite for killing not ringing quite true. When eventually he is roused, the result is precisely what one has been awaiting with dubious anticipation: his William Munny becomes an amalgam of all the violent, avenging riders he has portrayed in many a horrific showdown. Nevertheless, a richly satisfying achievement.
- New York, 28 August: Court hearings have been resumed in Manhattan in the continuing battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow over the custody of their children. Allen has accused his long-time lover of trying to blackmail him over allegations that he had sexually abused two of the three children he shares with the actress. Allen has rejected as "totally false and outrageous" allegations that he had molested their seven-year-old adopted daughter Dylan or their four-year-old biological son, Satchel. He stated that Farrow's lawyers had demanded $7 million to stop them making the allegations public. Farrow's lawyers deny this. They showed the judge sexually explicit nude photographs of Soon Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Farrow with whom Allen had an affair, which sparked the whole row, to provide "a good indication of the mental stability and condition of the man who is seeking custody of these children." But Allen has stated, "The only thing I have been guilty of is falling in love with Mia Farrow's adult daughter at the end of our own years together."
- New York, 14 September: Bill Cosby is America's top-paid entertainer. His expected $98 million in earnings for 1991-92 combined knocks the teeny-bop sensation New Kids on the Block off the top spot.
- Hollywood, 16 September: Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton is reported to have told a group of 1,200 Hollywood supporters at a fundraising event ("Voices of Change") that he "always aspired to be in the cultural elite."
- New York, 18 September:
 Because of the wall-to-wall press coverage of the continuing battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow over their children, the release of Husbands and Wives has been brought forward. This (presumably) last Allen picture with Farrow creates some uncomfortable analogies with real life, as novelist-lecturer Allen, married to Farrow, has an affair with one of his young students (Juliette Lewis). Farrow, unmade up, naturalistically lit to look her age, is characterized as "a passive aggressor." A second couple, philanderer Sydney Pollack and neurotic wife Judy Davis, also play a part in this painfully funny and tragic look at sex, love and marriage, the director's habitual themes but made even more profound than in his previous films by Allen's recent personal experiences.
- Tokyo, 24 September: The Tokyo Festival, opening today, has reneged on showing Belgium's violent Cannes Critics' Prize winner, C'est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog).
 - Los Angeles, 25 September: James Fennimore Cooper's 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans, is an entertaining mixture of colonial history, romance and the sort of myth-making that laid the groundwork for the Western. In the role of Hawkeye, the free-spirited trapper who wanders the forests with his Mohican friends Chigachgook (Russell Means) and Uncas (Eric Schweig), Daniel Day-Lewis is a worthy successor to Randolph Scott in the 1936 screen version. Hawkeye is sent to protect the British woman Cora (Madeleine Stowe) from Magua (Wes Studi), a vengeance-crazed Huron. Aside from a lively performance from Day-Lewis, most of the characters are rather cardboard, sacrificed to the action. Michael Mann directs the movie as an old-fashioned adventure-romance, only paying lip-service to the doomed nobility of the Native American. Yet the series of attacks, escapes, sieges, fights, deaths and triumphs are spectacularly handled. An outstanding moment occurs when a distant fireworks disply turns out to be a nocturnal battle.
- Amsterdam, 29 September: The Dutch Film Museum has unearthed what it believes to be the only surviving copies of six early Walt Disney silents made between 1923 and 1927. The films will be shown at next month's Pordenone silent film festival in Italy.
- Los Angeles, 5 October: A suit brought against Spike Lee in the U.S. District Court here last month by George Halliday, concerning Lee's usage of Halliday's Rodney King footage in Malcolm X, has been settled out of court.
- Seoul, 5 October: More than 120,000 Koreans have seen Ji-yeong Jeong's White Badge since its January opening. The film, which depicts South Korea's participation in the Vietnam War, is the first overtly anti-war film to be permitted by Seoul's censors.
- New York, 9 October:
 The plethora of Columbus enterprises marking the 500th anniversary of his voyage of discovery has ranged from the merely tedius Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, to a German animated feature about a cute talking woodworm on board the explorer's ship, the Santa Maria. But it was always assumed that Ridley Scott's epic, with Gérard Depardieu as the obstinate navigator, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, would be the Big One. So it is all the more disappointing that it, too, misses the boat. Scott employs handsome spectacle, a large and sometimes incomprehensible Euro cast (Sigourney Weaver's Queen Isabella is a notable exception) and moody Olde Worlde atmosphere, but there is no disguising the confusion in a two-and-a-half-hour film, heavily cut but still sagging, that can't make up its mind about its central character. Depardieu imposes humanity by sheer force of presence, but audience indifference to things Columbus (the British are contributing Carry on Columbus) suggests the movie began with the wind taken out of its sales.
 - Chicago, 9 October: Robert Redford should direct more often. His third feature, A River Runs Through It, sensitively adapted and superbly crafted from Norman MacLean's autobiographical novella, is a heartachingly graceful film of warmth and great beauty. It spans the early decades of the 20th century and explores the deep love in a Montana minister's family who are not given to communicating well with each other. The men -- Tom Skerritt as father, Craig Sheffer as solid young Norman (voiced in maturity by Redford as narrator) and Brad Pitt (as radiant as the young Redford) as wild, self-destructive golden boy brother, Paul -- find mutual understanding in one common bond: fishing for trout on the Big Blackfoot River, where life, religion and self-expression become a joyous unity and make surprisingly compelling cinema. It's really all about the tragedy of being unable to save a lost soul who will have none of it, but it does much to promote fly-fishing as an artful pastime, courtesy of Philippe Rousselot's stunning camera and Redford's loving direction.
- Berlin, 12 October: A court has ordered the destruction of the gory post-mortem sex movie Necromaniac 2, from Jörg Buttgereit, without a trial or hearing. The court holds it breaks a German law forbidding graphic violence in films.
- London, 16 October:
 From Australia comes the year's most original, irresistible and joyous film, Strictly Ballroom. Adored at the Cannes Festival and garlanded with eight awards in its own country, the movie started life as an improvised stage production in Oz, co-written by Baz Luhrmann. He has now made his film directing debut with it -- so successfully, that it can only be a matter of time before he joins the international filmmaking scene. The story concerns a young ballroom dancer (Paul Mercurio) with ambitions to become champion. His unorthodox approach, however, incenses the conventional ballroom dancing establishment, his partner departs, and he ends up with a seemingly plain novice (Tara Morice). The plot cannot convey the imagination, humor and originality of the piece, performed by an amazing cast in which newcomers Mercurio and Morice are totally enchanting. It has style, exuberance and heart -- on no account miss it.
 - Paris, 21 October: Although Cyril Collard's Strictly Ballroom (Savage Nights), adapted from his own novel, is not overtly autobiographical, the story of Jean, a young photographer (played by Collard), who discovers his HIV positive, is based on reality. Collard was one of the first well-known people in France to talk openly about his illness, and it is impossible not to make a connection between the director-writer and the promiscuous bisexual character he plays. Filmed in a vivid semi-documentary style, it follows the activities of the irresponsible Jean who continues to have unsafe sex, and threatens a gang with his infected blood. But the character and the film gradually gain our sympathy, leading to greater understanding.
- New York, 23:
 Directorial debuts don't come much more sensationally than that of writer and director Quentin Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs is sickeningly violent, appallingly funny and arrestingly accomplished -- clearly the work of a movie brat intelligently versed in Scorsese, Hong Kong action flicks and pulp fiction. A testosterone-heavy ensemble headed by Harvey Keitel (who co-produced) are the Dogs, a team of professional thieves assmebled for a job. The cleverly structured script begins at the aftermath of their bungled heist, flashing back and forth between the hoods' individual recollections and their present efforts to unmask the informer in their midst. Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi and Tim Roth all score in brutish moments.
- Rome, 4 November: According to a poll compiled by AGIS (General Association of Italian Spectacles), Last Tango in Paris (1973) is the biggest grosser ever released here over the last 40 years. La Dolce vita only gains fifth place after a trio of spaghetti Westerns, Trinity Is Still My Name, For a Few Dollars More and A Fistful of Dollars in that order.
- New York, 6 November: A U.N. agency is sending a delegatation of Writers Guild of America members to visit refugee camps in Somalia, Kenya, Croatia and Bosnia with the hope of generating scripts that will convey the immense gravity of the situation in this war-torn and troubled zones.
- Los Angeles, 11 November:
 After the overwhelming success of Beauty and the Beast last year, Disney's newest animated feature, Aladdin looks like it wil become an even bigger hit. The statistics behind its production are as impressive as the film -- over three years in the making, nearly 600 artists, over a million drawings, and computer-generated imagery that create the illusion of three-dimensional space. The characters have more depth, too, with a hunky hero (voiced by Scott Weinger and sung by Brad Kane) and a spunky heroine (voiced by Linda Larkin and sung by Lea Salonga), and a hilarious genie, a vocal tour de force performed by Robin Williams.
 - New York, 13 November: Francis Ford Coppola chose versatile British character actor Gary Oldman to play the title role in his Bram Stoker's Dracula, so named because of its fidelity to the famous Gothic novel. Oldman's vampire is doomed to be a creature of the night after forsaking God but aroused by the image of a British woman (Winona Ryder) who resembles his own lost love. Oldman does well by the monster, offering homage to every evil Count from Lugosi to Christopher Lee, and Anthony Hopkins is a little overachieving as the vampire killer Van Helsing. The rest of the cast is serviceable, except Keanu Reeves, who -- not atypically -- is wooden and somehow empty on what seems to him to be another "excellent" adventure. Coppola seems to approach the film as chunks of experimental opportunity, some of which work out all right while others are mannered or even campy. What is undeniable is the tremendous buzz of the film's energy, particularly in a fantastic middle sequence that plays like a psychedelic sexual nightmare.
- New York, 18 November:
 There have been complaints that Spike Lee's Malcolm X is "inflammatory," mainly due to the use of the notorious videotape of the Rodney King police beating that led to the recent L.A. riots. It seems unlikely, though, that his sober and meticulous biography of the charismatic activist could create further violence. Just as Do the Right Thing (1989) was the capstone of Lee's earlier career, Malcolm X marks the next milestone in the filmmaker's artistic maturity. It seems everything Lee has done up to this point has been to prepare him for this epic biography of America's fiery civil-rights leader, who is superbly played by Denzel Washington, from his early days as a zoot-suited hustler known as "Detroit Red" to his spiritual maturity after his pilgrimage to Mecca, as a Black Muslim by the name of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Do the Right Thing climaxed with the photographic images of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King engulfed by flames of rage; Malcolm X explores the genesis and evolution of that rage over Malcolm's lifetime, and how these two great figures -- held up to the public as polar-opposites within the African American human rights movement (King for nonviolent civil disobedience, Malcolm for achieving equality "by any means necessary") -- were each essential to the agenda of the other. Lee careens from the hedonistic ebullience of Malcolm's early days to the stark despair of prison, from his life-changing conversion to Islam to his emergence as a dynamic political leader -- all with an epic sweep and vitality that illuminates personal details as well as political ideology. Angela Bassett is also terrific as Malcolm's wife, Betty Shabazz. -- Jim Emerson, Amazon.com
 - Hollywood, 11 December: The Jack Nicholson-Tom Cruise starrer A Few Good Men, directed by Rob Reiner, is the first Hollywood movie ever to have premiered simultaneously in the U.S. and 50 other countries. In this dramatic courtroom thriller, adapted by Aaron Sorkin from his stage play, Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Cruise), a Navy lawyer who has never seen the inside of the courtroom, defends two stubborn Marines, Dawson and Downey (Wolfgang Bodison and James Marshall) who have been accused of murdering a colleague. He (Cruise) is known as being lazy and had arranged for a plea bargain. Downey's Aunt Ginny appoints Cmdr. Galloway (Demi Moore) to represent him. Also on the legal staff is Lt. Sam Weinberg (Kevin Pollak). The team rounds up many facts and Kaffee is discovering that he is really cut out for trial work. The defense is originally based upon the fact that PFC Santiago, the victim, was given a "CODE RED". Santiago was basically a screw-up. At Guantanamo, screw-ups aren't tolerated. Especially by Col. Nathan Jessup (Nicholson). In Cuba, Jessup and two senior officers (J. T. Walsh and Kiefer Sutherland) try to give all the help they can, but Kaffee knows something's fishy. In the conclusion of the film, the fireworks are set off by a confrontation between Jessup and Kaffee.
- London, 18 December:
 Richard Attenborough has continued his exploration of the lives of great 20th-century figures with Chaplin, in which he has attempted to make narrative sense of the long life of the most famous screen comic, within the limits of the conventional biopic. More difficult, however, was the casting of the title character. He had to be handsome, but not tall; he had to age from 18 to 83; he had to be a superb mime and acrobat; and he had to start with a Cockey accent and finish with a polished English voice of the later years. The director found him in Robert Downey Jr., who has succeeded in all these departments, doing an excellent job re-creating Chaplin's graceful slapstick and getting inside the silent-film superstar's head over many years of triumph, defeat, scandal, official persecution, exile, and inner peace. A huge cast portray the allies, friends, lovers, and enemies in Chaplin's life, including Moira Kelly as his final, longtime wife, Oona, Kevin Kline as Douglas Fairbanks, Geraldine Chaplin as Charlie's mother, and James Woods as a prosecutor working hard to nail Chaplin for anti-American sentiments. Attenborough declines to tell the story in a flat, linear way, employing such clever techniques as detailing one chapter in Chaplin's life as a silent comedy. The climactic scene set at an Oscar® tribute for Chaplin will get the tears flowing.
|
1 January - Los Angeles, CA, 
