1946 … 1999 …1971 … 2024? What was the best ever year for film?
In three weeks’ time, the credits will roll on the best cinema season in recent memory. Ten films are up for the best picture Oscar on 10 March and not a dud among them. That is unusual. Usually you will find an Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in there somewhere. Or maybe more than one (Babel, The Blind Side), or even a trio (Crash, Les Miserables, Bohemian Rhapsody). Often, it’s hard to get jazzed by the awards race; sometimes it’s tricky to feel strongly about any of the big contenders.
This year is different. Not only is the quality elevated; audience engagement has been sky-high. Much of that is down to the Barbenheimerjuggernaut, giving brainy blockbusters their post-Covid event movie moment. But the watercooler would have been noisy nonetheless: The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall and Poor Things are all strikingly ambitious and singular works of art that have fuelled robust debate.
What else is on the list? American Fiction: a lovely, limber debut. The Holdovers: immaculate winter light. Past Lives: a Brief Encounter for the Skype generation. Maestro: a passion project with heart and fabulous prosthetic jowls. Plus, a massive masterpiece from Scorsese.
And these are just the movies the Academy has favoured. Their snubs include Passages, Monica, Showing Up and maybe the best movie of the titles in the mix: All of Us Strangers.
So: 2023 has a strong claim to be the best year in film since 2013 (The Act of Killing, 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, The Great Beauty, Frances Ha, A Touch of Sin, Nebraska, The Wolf of Wall Street, Under the Skin). But can it claim the overall crown? Our writers take to the soapbox to champion their favourite years in cinema history.
1971: an explosion of brilliant movies
The greatness of 1971 cinema is complicated by the nihilism, the pessimism, the violence, bleary despair and world-nausea that keeps on characterising the great pictures made that year. These were not films whose key moments could be cut together into a feelgood montage reel, with That’s Entertainment playing over them. They were routinely about being crazy, paranoid, disenchanted and tired of life. Even Norman Jewison’s crackingly good Fiddler on the Roof is about pogroms.When Dirk Bogarde’s humiliated, infatuated composer Gustav von Aschenbach is carried off the beach in Death in Venice, hair-dye running down his face, it’s a valedictory image of utter defeat: the defiantly morbid passion, artistry and decadence that preceded it were very 1971. So was the transgressive genius of Ken Russell’s continuingly suppressed The Devils. (Although Dušan Makavejev’s WR The Mysteries of the Organism had a 60s kind of eroticism, without the thanatotic darkness of 1971.) Peter Bogdanovich’s superb The Last Picture Show seemed (wrongly) to intuit the death of cinema itself, though the staggering naked-swim scene is as thrillingly alive as anything in that or any other year.
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was a nightmarish vision of state surveillance and control, and loathing of the young. Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs was a horrifying evocation of violence in bucolic Britain and William Friedkin’s The French Connection was a viscerally powerful thriller about New York spiralling downwards into chaos, and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry gave us a despotic lawman who gets every dirty job that comes along. Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place had Richard Attenborough as a sleazy, nasty, depressed serial killer for a sleazy, nasty depressed Britain and Mike Hodges’ superb noir Get Carter was a brilliant satirical assault on the British class-system, shame-system and spite-system.How was it that so many brilliant movies suddenly exploded out of the pipeline in 1971? In Britain, it happened to be the year of John Trevelyan’s retirement as a liberal chief of the British Board of Film Censors (as it was then known). He had helped to create the conditions for powerful and boundary-pushing films. Then there was the fact that 60s grooviness was souring into an angrier and more confrontational mood. Above all, filmmakers were pushing for freedom to say what they wanted, a kind of violence in itself. It made 1971 a uniquely exciting vintage. Peter Bradshaw
1928: three Alfred Hitchcock films released
Out of chaos comes creativity, and contradiction. In its infancy, sound cinema charged like a bull into Hollywood’s china shop and the year 1928 saw studios thrown into confusion as they scrambled to incorporate synch-sound technology. Yet, some of US cinema’s greatest and most melancholic silent masterpieces emerged in this miraculous year. Take Victor Sjöström’s elemental The Wind, with Lillian Gish facing down a storm of male violence, King Vidor’s American epic of failed dreams The Crowd, Josef von Sternberg’s Hollywood exposé The Last Command, or Charlie Chaplin’s final silent film, The Circus, by turns heart-crushingly poignant and stomach-rattlingly hilarious. A sweet confection such as Paul Fejos’s Lonesome managed to rise even with a spoonful of dialogue folded in. On the Mississippi river, one era of American comedy concluded, and another began with two steamboats skippered respectively by a voiceless Buster Keaton and a vocal Mickey Mouse.
Elsewhere, Soviet cinema produced such monuments as Storm over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin) and October (Sergei Eisenstein) while Alexsandr Dovshenko conjured the eccentric visions of Zvenigora. Fritz Lang thrilled German audiences with his high-octane spy thriller Spione, René Clair finessed the art of French silent comedy with The Italian Straw Hat and Les Deux Timides, and in Britain Alfred Hitchcock released not one but three films in the space of 12 months. Revolution rumbled across Europe, in fact, as the rules of cinema were dismantled and reassembled by the surrealist imaginations of artists such as Germaine Dulac (The Seashell and the Clergyman) and Man Ray (The Star Fish) – while Luis Buñuel and Jean Epstein made the strangely delirious Gothic horror The Fall of the House of Usher.
Greater even than all these, a Danish director and an Italian star collaborated in France on the painful perfection of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), in which Carl Theodor Dreyer uncovered a universe of human emotion in intimate close-ups of Falconetti’s tear-stained face. Disruptive technique aligned with a timeless story, revealing the limitless power of the art form. This still unsurpassed film reveals, as Virginia Woolf had imagined in a recent essay, “what cinema might do if left to its own devices”. Pamela Hutchinson
1991: the past speaks to the present
It famously emerged from the checkerboard floor like a treacly slowburning nightmare: the T-1000, a liquid metal killing machine that out
skilled even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s seemingly invulnerable first iteration. Terminator had been a surprise hit. Terminator 2: Judgment Day upped the stakes, with a villain now capable of shapeshifting into anything it touched.
To choose 1991 might seem surprising, particularly given the more high-profile 90s years in film: the triumphant run of movies in 1994 (Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption) or that year with another seminal James Cameron, 1997’s Titanic. But 1991’s films have a way of speaking to the present. Terminator 2 heralded the rise of CGI, leading David Foster Wallace to coin, in an essay that went against the grain (he hated it), the “inverse cost and quality law”: ie, “the larger a movie’s budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be”. Cue the debate about superhero movies decades later.
The throughlines continue. Amid recent global reckonings on racism and sexism, much joy has been found in rediscovering Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash’s beautiful story about three generations of Gullah women living on South Carolina’s sea islands. John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood depicted young Black men living against the backdrop of police intimidation and gentrification. Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise was a joyous, fun ode to female friendship out of the shadows of male violence. The big winner of the 1991 Oscars, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, is the first and only horror film to win the award for best picture, a distinction that brings to mind the debate about “prestige horror” in recent years. And on the very contemporary topic of very long films: last year I had the pleasure of watching Edward Yang’s four-hour epic A Brighter Summer Day at the cinema. The story of student life in 1960s Taiwan is beautifully told and never dragged across the four hours; by the end, I was in tears. Rebecca Liu
1999: Y2K anxiety infects film industry with fear
The 90s might have shown a concerning, and ultimately, premonitory rise of franchise reliance but the decade was also capped off with a reminder of just what could be achieved outside more clearly set boundaries. Nineteen ninety-nine was, after all, the final act for a decade that saw the birth of a new independent film movement. The films it’s now best known for show an energy and sense of risk that have never felt quite as exciting in the years since.
We saw one-of-a-kind debuts from Sofia Coppola with her never-bettered heartbreaker The Virgin Suicides, her then partner Spike Jonze with Being John Malkovich, and Lynne Ramsay with the haunting coming-ofage drama Ratcatcher. The new wave of auteurs who had gained a foot earlier in the 90s flourished further with Paul Thomas Anderson’s audacious Magnolia, David Fincher’s incendiary Fight Club, Mike Judge’s soon-to-be-rediscovered Office Space, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, Doug Liman’s Go and Alexander Payne’s brutally funny Election.
Even the more star-driven studio movies were better and smarter than usual: Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, David O Russell’s Three Kings, Frank Oz’s Bowfinger and John McTiernan’s The Thomas Crown Affair. Horror was also on the upswing with The Sixth Sense, Audition and the subgenre-creating The Blair Witch Project while fears over our increasingly connected world also led to David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and The Matrix, the rare franchise-starter that felt genuinely original (remember those?).
I’m far from alone in this theory. In 2019, a book was published making this exact case at the same time as a live London panel discussed the same topic while this past month has seen Alamo Drafthouse cinemas in the US show some of that year’s very best, screenings of which have been mostly sold out. Maybe it was some sort of Y2K anxiety forcing fear into the industry before everyone decided to play it safe instead. Benjamin Lee
1968: one giant leap for filmmaking
It took a few years for the full effect of the counter-culture to emerge on to the big screen, but 1968 saw other (and perhaps more impressive) revolutionary acts. Most notable was that one giant leap in film-making, 2001: A Space Odyssey – a lodestar for technique and design that has never really been topped. That it dovetailed with psychedelia was a coincidence MGM rolled with for marketing purposes, branding the unorthodox experience “the ultimate trip”.
Another New Yorker (Kubrick was an expat who settled in Britain) made an indelible mark on pop culture the same year: Barbra Streisand in the bold, brilliant and unabashedly Jewish musical-comedy Funny Girl. While “daffy dames” were nothing new to cinema, few could carry a tune like Streisand and stay sexy enough to entice Omar Sharif.
The Polish director Roman Polanski made his first American picture with the NYC-real estate satire Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, still one of the best films about paranoia and gaslighting since, well, Gaslight. Its co-star, director John Cassavetes, released his documentarystyle 16mm picture Faces the same year, a mightily influential low-budget character drama. In Hollywood, Steve McQueen’s Bullitt rewired action sequences with the hilly San Franciscoset car chase that left audiences gasping. And elsewhere in outer space, in an action picture with some sly social commentary, Charlton Heston landed on the doomed Planet of the Apes … a planet that looked eerily familiar at the end. Jordan Hoffman
1955: a howl of young angst galvanises a generation
The mid-50s are often brushed off as an awkward transitional phase between Hollywood’s Golden Age and Italian neorealism on one end and the explosion of New Wave movements and counterculture cinema on the other. But with television as a looming threat to cinema, the movies responded with the alluring, eye-catching vibrancy of VistaVision, Technicolor and CinemaScope. Even the black-andwhite popped.
In 1955, film noir darkened and expanded into the dreamy southern gothic of Charles Laughton’s one-anddone masterpiece The Night of the Hunter, with Robert Mitchum at his most seductive as a Biblical con man stalking the countryside. At the same time, the two-fisted grit of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly led the post-war genre into the cold war, with a glowing briefcase that intimated the apocalypse. Meanwhile, across the ocean, the French were raising the bar in other genres, too, with the twisted psychology of Diabolique and the standard-setting diamond heist of Rififi.
The colours in 1955 may have been hyper-real, but they were matched by emotional intensity. There’s Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, a romance between a widow and her gardener that blooms in an oppressive hothouse of gossip and class codes. There are the sensual wonders of Max Ophüls’ Lola Montes, which puts the tragic life of a 19th-century European dancer and courtesan in the middle of a literal three-ring circus. Even the year’s diversions swooned, from the Moulin Rouge of Jean Renoir’s French Cancan to Frank Tashlin’s premium Martinand-Lewis vehicle Artists and Models to Katharine Hepburn tumbling into a Venice canal in David Lean’s Summertime.
All these trends coalesced in the beautiful, tragic year of James Dean, which started in the spring with Elia Kazan’s East of Eden and ended posthumously in the fall with Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. Two CinemaScope pictures – one in black-andwhite, the other in colour, both howling with a young angst that would galvanise a generation. Scott Tobias
1982: reactionary forces and subversiveness in the air
This was an annus mirabilis for cinema, though it didn’t seem it at the time. Thatcher and Reagan, Falklands War jingoism, Mary Whitehouse condemning newly minted Channel 4, and Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire screenwriter Colin Welland trumpeting “The British are coming!” suggested reactionary forces were on the rise. But subversiveness was also in the air: 1982 was a banner year for science fiction, horror and fantasy, genres still despised by many mainstream critics, but embraced by younger audiences. Though ET: The Extra-Terrestrial topped the box office, poor reviews or lacklustre takings meant other classics – The Thing, Blade Runner and Cat People among them – took longer to find their fandoms.
Tron and Koyaanisqatsi broke new ground, Poltergeist and Creepshow nudged horror into the mainstream, and Conan the Barbarian and The Beastmaster boosted heroic fantasy. First-rate sequels Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and The Empire Strikes Back heralded the ascent of blockbuster franchises. At the opposite end of the budgetary scale, Q: The Winged Serpent, Tenebrae, Liquid Sky, Android, Basket Case and other gems all benefited from the rep circuit and the proliferation of VHS.
More “respectable” releases were not too shabby either: 1982 gave us First Blood, Moonlighting, 48 Hrs, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Draughtsman’s Contract, The Year of Living Dangerously and Tootsie, to name just a few, while Diner and Fast Times at Ridgemont High ushered in a new wave of acting talent.
New German Cinema’s big three each released new films: Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Wim Wenders’ The State of Things – and there was Veronika Voss and Querelle from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who fatally overdosed in June 1982. Samuel Fuller proved he still had the right stuff with his provocative White Dog, Ingmar Bergman delivered his late masterpiece Fanny and Alexander, and British critics lambasted Lindsay Anderson’s satirical chef d’oeuvre, Britannia Hospital. Of course they did: it savaged everything the establishment held dear. Anne Billson
1960: aesthetic warning shots popping off
The watershed year between Old and New Hollywood earmarked by writer Mark Harris in his book Scenes from a Revolution is 1967. But seditious stirrings were already afoot in many countries at the start of the decade; 1960 saw so many unmistakeable aesthetic warning shots popping off that it has to be in the running for greatest film year. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was the big one, ear cupped to dark whisperings of the psyche that made further mockery of Hays Code niceties; and hand cocked to slash staid film grammar to pieces in the immortal shower scene.
It wasn’t a vintage Hollywood year, with only Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus hitting equal heights. That only served to highlight the richness and radical nature of what was on offer internationally. Hitchcock’s fellow film grammarian JeanLuc Godard released Breathless, the French nouvelle vague’s flagship film, and François Truffaut and Louis Malle kept the momentum up with Shoot the Piano Player and Zazie dans le Métro. In the UK, Karel Reisz inaugurated the less self-conscious but equally modern British New Wave with his kitchensink class Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; meanwhile, cosy old Michael Powell trashed his own career, and the very motivations of cinema itself, in his serial-killer shocker Peeping Tom.
The likes of Village of the Damned, Eyes without a Face, L’Avventura, Purple Noon and The Housemaid all showcased a restlessness and dislocation that also said change was in the air. Ozu’s Late Autumn and Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers were more classicist achievements, but still very much part of the flood of captivating global cinema that profited from Hollywood’s exhaustion and laid the grounds for its transformation by the next generation of young guns. If broader significance is just as important as quantitative excellence, then 1960 opened many doors. Phil Hoad
1939: Hollywood’s Golden Age at its shiniest
The Oscar pack was led by Gone with the Wind, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and The Wizard of Oz. On top of his accomplished minor effort Drums Along the Mohawk, John Ford gave the world two unassailable masterpieces Stagecoach and Young Mr Lincoln, which is sort of like inventing the cure for polio the same year you set the world record for fastest mile. Whether ensconced in drama, comedy, or action, romance had never seen a more fruitful annus mirabilis, an embarrassment of riches spread among Ninotchka, The Women, Goodbye Mr Chips, Wuthering Heights, and Only Angels Have Wings. Basil Rathbone made his debut as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Even the forgotten B-pictures, marquee-fillers such as the cashgrabby three-quel Son of Frankenstein, display a level of artistry and conviction of performance alien to today’s franchise-industrial complex.
But if the distinction of the artform’s best year hinges on a deeper sense of significance, 1939 can still measure up, a prefab milestone pedestaled by an industry celebrating 50 years of motion picture technology and 25 since the biz went west. Each studio showcased its talent on either side of the camera with bigger budgets and ballooned ambitions, upping the ante on the inspired artifice the dream factory sold to an eager America. At the same time, 1939 embodied the currents of history in less choreographed, sometimes less flattering ways; Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy threw the United States’ isolationist policy prior to the second world war into unforgiving relief, while the Indiaset Gunga Din paired its gallivanting adventure with ethnocentric fantasies of the “Thuggee murder cult”. Glitzy and garish, politically forward-looking and blinkered, virtuosic and commercial, here was Hollywood during the shiniest glint of the Golden Age. Charles Bramesco
2013: the winds of change
We now have a very different film industry than we did a decade ago: Covid, streaming, MeToo and Black Lives Matter have seen to that. But if you were reading the runes, the winds of change were blowing earlier, none more evident in 2013. Leading the way has to be Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave: a forthright drama taken from Solomon Northup’s memoir that won the best picture Oscar and – although McQueen is British – sensationally changed the game for Black American film-makers. After all those decades of exclusion it felt like female directors were finally arriving in significant numbers – Sofia Coppola (Bling Ring), Clio Barnard (Selfish Giant), Joanna Hogg (Exhibition) – as well as an impressive sighting of still-more-anactor Greta Gerwig in the Noah Baumbach-directed Frances Ha.
Established American heavyweights were still turning out great stuff though: Martin Scorsese scored an unexpected hit with The Wolf of Wall Street, the Coens made the brilliant Inside Llewyn Davis, and Jim Jarmusch made the hilarious vampire-rocker film Only Lovers Left Alive. Meanwhile nonUS auteurs were making tremendous inroads: Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty knocked everyone’s socks off, Pawel Pawlikowski’s fabulous faith drama Ida won the best foreign language film Oscar, and Lars von Trier outflanked everyone with his bizarre four-hour erotic dreamscape Nymphomaniac.
It’s an astonishing list, which doesn’t even include two personal favourites, which pointed the way forward themselves. Gravity, with its complex light box trickery and considered attempt at space realism pushed the boundaries of what an effects movie could accomplish, while the astonishing Under the Skin, from Zone of Interest’s Jonathan Glazer, exuded a don’t-care idiosyncrasy from its opening frames, completely reformulating what could be acceptable in a big star vehicle. 2013 really was a year to savour. Andrew Pulver
1975: simply the best. Case closed
For quality, innovation and sheer shock and awe, it’s hard to look past 1975, the year that most accurately predicted Hollywood’s future direction of travel. This was the year where the ascendant cinema of the New Hollywood collided with the then-nascent blockbuster. There would only be one winner in that clash: a three-tonne great white shark with a hankering for sunbathers.
Jaws might have ultimately been the first crack in the dam that led to our current flood of thudding, uninspired mega-movies, but it remains a bravura piece of mass entertainment, a technological and storytelling marvel that more than merited its place among that year’s Oscar best picture nominees. By the way, has there ever been a better best picture shortlist? Even 1974 had a
dud in there – the now horribly dated Towering Inferno – but 1975’s is all killer, no filler: joining Jaws were Kubrick’s picaresque masterpiece Barry Lyndon, Altman’s brilliant, sprawling, country music epic Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon, with Pacino in imperious form and John Cazale adding another entry to the greatest filmography of all time, and that year’s ultimate winner, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Those five alone would make for an exemplary movie year, but below the fold there was plenty more going on. It was a great time for ambitious, often transgressive film-making: Ken Russell and The Who’s wild rock opera Tommy; Warren Beatty’s ripe political satire Shampoo; Pasolini’s arthouse shocker Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom; the giddy joys of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rocky Horror’s gleeful rejection of sexual and gender norms made it a queer cinema landmark, but it wasn’t alone in moving the dial in 1975: Dog Day Afternoon featured a sympathetic portrayal of a trans character – Chris Sarandon’s gender-reassignment surgery-seeking Leon – decades before The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry or Tangerine. Black cinema too enjoyed landmark releases in 1975: the coming-ofage drama Cooley High, which helped nudge portrayals of black communities away from the cheap thrills of Blaxploitation and towards something more rounded and real; and, on this side of the Atlantic, Horace Ové’s pioneering account of Black British life, Pressure.
Still not convinced of 1975’s merits? I could point to nerve-shredding Robert Redford thriller Three Days of the Condor, or Fellini’s autobiographical classic Amarcord, or Gene Hackman repeating the trick of The Conversation in the great forgotten paranoid thriller Night Moves. But how about we leave it at this: the current reigning champ in Sight and Sound’s critics poll of the greatest films of all time hails from 1975: Chantal Akerman’s slow cinema gamechanger, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Case closed, your honour. Gwilym Mumford
1946: studio system in full fettle
The numbers do not lie: the biggest all-time movie year for attendance was 1946, with more than 90m weekly admissions —60% of the population of North America.
The studio system was in full fettle and John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks all at the height of their powers, with the dark currents of noir reaching the high-water mark of Hawk’s The Big Sleep, while Ford made one of his battle-weariest westerns, My Darling Clementine. It was Joan Crawford’s finest hour in Mildred Pierce, Rita Hayworth’s in Gilda, while Cary Grant gave a performance etched in charcoal in Hitchcock’s Notorious.
In Europe, Italian neorealism was in full swing, with Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine, and Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà shot in the rubble of bombed Europe, while in France Jean Cocteau made his best film, La Belle et la Bête. America and Europe had never been closer, and for once, Hollywood was not the straightforward dream factory.
Flush with the victory against fascism, weary with the cost of the effort, Hollywood was more like a dreamer tossing and turning with vivid, turbulent dreams. William Wyler made one of the most disquieting Oscar winners ever made, about the experience of returning veterans, The Best Years of Our Lives. Even Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life plays much darker than you remember it, as befits a film made by two returning vets, confronting the heartlessness of slumlord capitalism before ushering George Bailey to his happy ending.
The boom did not last. Attendance dropped in 1947 as couples stayed home, turned on their TV sets and moviegoing went into the freefall from which it has never quite recovered. Tom Shone
… 2027: the best year is yet to come
A tumultuous year I thought I’d not live to see. We begin with the dissolution of the Academy as its centenary event. At last, diminished audiences and the profusion of sub-categories and voting groups meet their destiny. “Give us a break!” says Spike Lee, final president, as he gets his directing prize for No One Asked Me.
Quentin Tarantino delivers his third final film, GloriUS. The SURveillance channel buys out Netflix and breaks viewing records with Chez the Kelces, a two-week coverage of you know who.
Daniel Day-Lewis returns to play in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Last Dream of a Dressmaker; 81% of filmgoers ask, “Who is Daniel Day-Lewis?”
Reports that the TRUMP media park has special effects problems. Trump announces: “It’s a done deal – Brad Pitt will be me.” Pitt leaves the country. Trump: “Who knew? He turned out so nasty.”
Stephen Frears wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes with a ruminative essay film, What I Decided Not to Make. Jane Campion opens Tender Will Be the Night, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Dick Diver and Margot Robbie as Nicole.
Martin Scorsese releases a fourhour cut of Big Horn, about the 1876 battle as a model of America’s wickedness. Leonardo Di Caprio is Custer, De Niro as Sitting Bull.
The old Academy Museum in Los Angeles is sold to Elon Musk. There are 211 operating movie theatres in the US. Peter Morgan agrees to continue The Crown, despite ongoing legal action between Princes Harry and William.
Seven cans of the lost The Magnificent Ambersons wash up on the shores of Puerto Vallarta. Frederick Wiseman, now 97, makes a four-hour film, Quiet, about the world as a panorama of silence. Walter Murch is the sound designer. Wiseman announces: “That’s all, folks!” David Thomson
• This article was amended on 16 February 2024. The trans character Leon in the film Dog Day Afternoon was played by Chris Sarandon, not John Cazale as an earlier version said.