Hard Movie Trivia Questions

33 hard movie trivia questions with answers

1. Which was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?

   Answer: Wings It took the award at the first ceremony, held in 1929.

2. What was the first feature-length film with synchronised dialogue?

   Answer: The Jazz Singer Released in 1927, it carried only a few spoken sequences among its songs.

3. Which non-English-language film first won the Academy Award for Best Picture?

   Answer: Parasite It won for 2019, more than ninety years into the awards.

4. In Citizen Kane, what turns out to be the meaning of 'Rosebud'?

   Answer: A childhood sled The object appears only in the film's closing shot.

5. Which was the first film to win all five main Academy Awards?

   Answer: It Happened One Night It took picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay in 1935.

6. Who directed the 1927 science fiction film Metropolis?

   Answer: Fritz Lang The German silent film was made at the Babelsberg studios near Berlin.

7. The late-1950s French film movement of Godard and Truffaut is known as what?

   Answer: The New Wave Its directors favoured location shooting, small crews and lightweight cameras.

8. Which film festival awards the Palme d'Or?

   Answer: Cannes Venice gives a Golden Lion and Berlin a Golden Bear instead.

9. Alfred Hitchcock never won Best Director. Which of his films won Best Picture?

   Answer: Rebecca Producer David O. Selznick collected the award for 1940, not Hitchcock.

10. Who directed Seven Samurai and Rashomon?

    Answer: Akira Kurosawa Seven Samurai was later remade as an American Western.

11. Which 1902 short film by Georges Melies depicts a voyage to the Moon?

    Answer: A Trip to the Moon Melies was a stage magician before he turned to filmmaking.

12. Which brothers held the first commercial film screening in Paris in 1895?

    Answer: The Lumiere brothers Their cinematographe both filmed and projected, and was light enough to travel.

13. Which was the first talking picture to win Best Picture?

    Answer: The Broadway Melody It won for the 1928-29 awards year, the second ceremony.

14. Which actor won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Gandhi?

    Answer: Ben Kingsley Attenborough directed the 1982 film and won Best Director for it.

15. Which cinematographer won his first Academy Award for Blade Runner 2049 after 13 earlier nominations?

    Answer: Roger Deakins Deakins won a second Oscar two years later for 1917.

16. Film editor Thelma Schoonmaker is the long-time collaborator of which director?

    Answer: Martin Scorsese Schoonmaker won editing Oscars for Raging Bull, The Aviator and The Departed.

17. Who composed the scores for the 1960s Dollars trilogy of westerns?

    Answer: Ennio Morricone Morricone's only competitive Oscar came for The Hateful Eight in 2016, nine years after his honorary award.

18. The stock sound effect known as the Wilhelm scream was first recorded for a film in which decade?

    Answer: 1950s It was recorded for Distant Drums (1951) and named after a character in The Charge at Feather River (1953).

19. Which visual effects company did George Lucas set up in 1975 to make Star Wars?

    Answer: Industrial Light & Magic ILM went on to create the effects for Jurassic Park and many later blockbusters.

20. Who directed the 1948 Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves?

    Answer: Vittorio De Sica The film received an honorary Academy Award before a regular foreign-language category existed.

21. Which Swedish director made The Seventh Seal and Persona?

    Answer: Ingmar Bergman Three of Bergman's films won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

22. The 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a landmark of which movement?

    Answer: German Expressionism Directed by Robert Wiene, it used painted, distorted sets to reflect its narrator's state of mind.

23. Who directed the 1925 Soviet film Battleship Potemkin?

    Answer: Sergei Eisenstein Its Odessa Steps sequence remains a standard teaching example of montage editing.

24. Which was the first colour film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?

    Answer: Gone with the Wind It won at the ceremony held in February 1940, for the films of 1939.

25. Which film won Best Picture for 1941, beating Citizen Kane?

    Answer: How Green Was My Valley John Ford also won Best Director for it, the third of his record four wins.

26. Universal Pictures was founded in 1912 by which producer?

    Answer: Carl Laemmle Zukor built what became Paramount, while Mayer ran MGM for decades.

27. Which 1988 Japanese animated film directed by Isao Takahata follows two siblings in wartime Kobe?

    Answer: Grave of the Fireflies It was released in Japan on a double bill with My Neighbor Totoro.

28. The 1926 feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger used which animation technique?

    Answer: Silhouette cut-outs It is the oldest surviving animated feature film, made in Germany over three years.

29. Which animator patented the rotoscope technique in 1917?

    Answer: Max Fleischer Fleischer's studio later produced the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons.

30. Which 1927 film won the only Academy Award ever given for Unique and Artistic Production?

    Answer: Sunrise The category was dropped after the first ceremony, leaving Wings as the sole recognised Best Picture winner.

31. Which director co-founded United Artists in 1919 with Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks?

    Answer: D. W. Griffith The four formed the company to control the distribution of their own films.

32. Which 1953 film was the first released in the widescreen CinemaScope format?

    Answer: The Robe 20th Century Fox introduced CinemaScope to lure audiences away from television.

33. Which was the first James Bond film, released in 1962?

    Answer: Dr. No Sean Connery starred in the first Eon production, adapted from Ian Fleming's sixth Bond novel.