TCM Monthly Preview: December 2025
December is the month where TCM relaxes into itself. The architecture is gentler than November's, the ambitions more domestic, and after the sustained political seriousness of October and November it's genuinely pleasant to arrive somewhere that has decided, at least for a few weeks, that warmth is its own value. The month has three distinct phases: a first half with genuine programming ambition - a Richard Pryor birthday night, a Christopher Guest curator evening, an Art Deco series running three Mondays, and one of the best single Spotlight entries of the year on December 11th - followed by a Classic Christmas Marathon that takes over the schedule from the 19th and doesn't let go until Christmas night, and then a post-Christmas week that has some of the most quietly interesting programming of the month buried where fewer people will find it.
The recurring structures: Merle Oberon is Star of the Month, which is more loaded than it might appear and deserves a conversation that TCM seems to be having with itself about her; the Divine Intervention Spotlight runs Thursdays, building toward Christmas night's centerpiece; the Art Deco series covers three Mondays with a different angle each time; and the Christmas Marathon itself, which I'll treat as a single entity rather than trying to annotate every film in seven days of continuous programming. There are essential films buried in it that most people won't find unless someone tells them where to look.
Let me also say upfront: at the end of this month, Wings of Desire (1987) runs at 1:45am on December 11th, and it is the best film airing in December. It doesn't fit any category in a way that makes it easy to flag. I'm flagging it now so you don't miss it.
~
Monday, December 1st opens with Richard Pryor's 85th birthday: Silver Streak (1976) at 8pm, Brewster's Millions (1985) at 10pm, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982) at 11:45pm, Richard Pryor… Here and Now (1983) at 1:15am, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986) at 3am.
The essential entry is Live on the Sunset Strip at 11:45pm. Pryor performing two years after the freebasing accident that set him on fire - addressing it directly, in language that doesn't soften itself, and making the audience laugh with him at the specificity of what nearly killed him. It's one of the great concert films and one of the most honest documents of what stand-up comedy can do when the performer trusts the audience to hold something real. The transition from the physical comedy of Silver Streak to Jo Jo Dancer (Pryor's barely-disguised autobiographical film, which he also directed) over the course of the night maps a career arc more efficiently than any biography could.
Tuesday, December 2nd opens the Merle Oberon Star of the Month with "Early Career Roles": The Dark Angel (1935) at 8pm, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) at 10pm, The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) at 11:45pm, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) at 1:15am. Then, at 5am: Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood (2019).
That 5am placement is not accidental, and TCM is doing something careful with it. Oberon was born in Bombay, likely to a father of mixed Indian and European heritage, and spent her entire Hollywood career denying this - constructing an alternative biography that claimed Tasmanian birth and European ancestry, because the racial categories of classical Hollywood would not have permitted a woman of mixed Indian heritage to be the romantic lead that the industry cast her as. She passed throughout her career. She was beautiful and talented and she lived inside a fiction because survival required it. Programming the early career films - Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Pimpernel, the romantic leads - and then following them with a documentary about the industry that made that fiction necessary is TCM acknowledging a history it spent decades not discussing. The Star of the Month tribute is also a reckoning.
Wednesday, December 3rd has Hanna Barbera Part 1 in prime time, which is what it is, followed by Anchors Aweigh (1945) at 11:45pm - Gene Kelly dancing with an animated Jerry Mouse in the sequence that defined Hollywood's belief in its own possibilities. Kelly choreographed it himself, spent two days on each frame of the integration shot, and the three minutes of him and Jerry dancing to "The Worry Song" remains one of the most purely joyful things American cinema produced in the 1940s.
Thursday, December 4th opens the Divine Intervention Spotlight: Forever, Darling (1956) at 8pm, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) at 9:45, The Bishop's Wife (1947) at 11:30pm. The Spotlight is organized as "Angelic Relationships" this week, and Here Comes Mr. Jordan is the film that set the template for every afterlife comedy that followed it - a boxer accidentally sent to heaven before his time, an angel who has to fix it, Claude Rains as the otherworldly bureaucrat who manages the mistake with elegant exasperation. It's a perfectly constructed film and Rains, as I've noted in earlier months, does more with less screen time than almost anyone in the classical era.
Friday, December 5th is Bill Condon's guest programmer night: Cover Girl (1944) at 8pm, New York, New York (1977) at 10pm, Silk Stockings (1957) at 1am. Condon directed Chicago and Dreamgirls and Beauty and the Beast, and his list is unapologetically about the pure pleasure of the Hollywood musical - the Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly of Cover Girl, the deliberate glamour of Scorsese's musical that critics didn't know what to do with in 1977 and still don't, and the Fred Astaire/Cyd Charisse Silk Stockings as the late classical musical's most elegant valediction. New York, New York at 10pm is the essential entry and the most defensible choice in the list - Scorsese making a musical about why musicals lie, with Liza Minnelli and De Niro in a love story whose dysfunction the film refuses to resolve into the genre's usual consolations. It's not a comfortable film and it's considerably better than its reputation.
Saturday, December 6th has the Debra Winger Two for One: People Will Talk (1951) and The Scarlet Empress (1934). Neither stars Winger, which means this is Winger-as-curator, and the choices are idiosyncratic in the way that suggests actual taste. Mankiewicz's People Will Talk is Cary Grant as a doctor who practices humanist medicine in an era suspicious of it, a film with a genuinely progressive politics under its comedy surface. Von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress is the opposite of humanist - a fever dream of Catherine the Great's rise, Marlene Dietrich surrounded by grotesque iconography, and one of the most formally excessive films the studio system ever allowed through its machinery. Putting these two films on the same Saturday night is a programmer saying: I have range. The overnight gives you Crossing Delancey (1988) and Girlfriends (1978), two Joan Micklin Silver films, the latter being her independent debut and one of the most honest films about young women in New York that the decade produced.
Sunday, December 7th runs Christmas in Connecticut (1945) at 8pm for Kid Fans, and the TCM Imports give you Buñuel's Simon of the Desert (1965) at 2:15am and Viridiana (1961) at 3:15am. Two Buñuel films back to back after a Barbara Stanwyck Christmas film is a tonal whiplash that feels intentional. Viridiana is the film that got Buñuel banned from Spain - a devout young woman who plans to become a nun visits her dying uncle, and the film dismantles her piety with a thoroughness and dark comedy that made the Vatican call it "an insult to Christianity." The famous Buñuel sequence in Viridiana is the Last Supper tableau with beggars, and it's one of the most scandalous compositions in film history, not because it's graphic but because it's composed with such formal precision that the blasphemy feels like geometry.
~
Monday, December 8th opens Art Deco Part 1: Grand Hotel (1932) at 8pm, Skyscraper Souls (1932) at 10pm, Metropolis (1927) at midnight. The Art Deco series running three Mondays is one of December's most interesting structural choices - not a filmmaker or a star but an architectural and design movement as the organizing principle, and the films chosen to illustrate it are not the obvious choices. Grand Hotel is the MGM prestige entry, Garbo and Barrymore in the flagship of the all-star ensemble format; Skyscraper Souls is the underrated companion, Warren William as a megalomaniac banker who treats his building as an extension of his ego, a pre-Code film with a bleakness about capitalism that the Code would never have permitted. Metropolis at midnight is Lang making Art Deco into apocalypse - the machine city as the logical endpoint of modernist design philosophy, the workers as ornament in a building they live inside. It's the film from which every science fiction visual grammar has descended, and seeing it after Skyscraper Souls makes the implicit argument of both films explicit.
Tuesday, December 9th continues Merle Oberon with "Bittersweet and Sour": These Three (1936) at 8pm, Lydia (1941) at 1am. These Three is Wyler's first collaboration with Lillian Hellman - an adaptation of The Children's Hour that replaces the original's lesbian relationship with a heterosexual love triangle because the Hays Code required it - and Oberon, Miriam Hopkins, and Joel McCrea are all excellent in a film that is most interesting for what it's not allowed to be about. The overnight gives you Un Carnet de bal (1937), a French film about a widow who searches for all the men she danced with at her first ball twenty years earlier, and A Day in the Country (1946), Renoir's unfinished adaptation of Maupassant, which he shot in 1936 and abandoned for personal and financial reasons and which was assembled and released after the war. Both are films about time and loss and what people remember incorrectly about the past.
Wednesday, December 10th runs Hanna Barbera Part 2, which I will leave for the appropriate audience, and note only that Charlotte's Web (1973) at 9pm is a better film than most people over 12 will admit.
Thursday, December 11th is the Divine Intervention Spotlight's "Modern Encounters" week: Heaven Can Wait (1978) at 8pm, The Angel Levine (1970) at 10pm, Oh, God! (1977) at midnight, and then, at 1:45am: Wings of Desire (1987).
Wings of Desire is Wim Wenders' film about angels who walk among the humans of divided Berlin, invisible, able to hear thoughts but unable to touch or taste or feel physical sensation - who want, simply, to be human. Bruno Ganz as Damiel, the angel who falls in love with a circus trapeze artist, and the film's formal conceit is that the world of angels is shot in black and white while the world of humans is in color, and when Damiel finally makes his choice and the color comes - it comes all at once, his first experience of red, of coffee, of cold, of the weight of his own coat - is one of the most moving sequences in any film I know. The film is about the desire to be present, to be mortal, to have something at stake, and Wenders made it in Berlin before the Wall came down, with the Wall visible in the background of every outdoor scene, and it has a historical resonance now that it couldn't have had when it was made.
Running it at 1:45am in the Divine Intervention Spotlight after Oh, God! and Heaven Can Wait is programmatically logical - all three films are about supernatural beings navigating the human world - but it's also slightly absurd, like putting Beethoven's Ninth on the same playlist as "Walking on Sunshine" because they're both music. Wings of Desire is in a different category than anything around it this month. Find it.
Friday, December 12th is the Christopher Guest director night: Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), This Is Spinal Tap (1984), The Big Picture (1989). Guest directed all four, and the lineup constitutes a complete statement about what his mockumentary form was doing. Spinal Tap is the origin and the standard, the film that proved the format could be both precisely satirical and genuinely affecting - the band is ridiculous and you feel for them. Waiting for Guffman at 8pm is the warmest entry, a community theater director whose belief in the production's importance exceeds what any honest observer could justify, and Christopher Guest playing Corky St. Clair with a total commitment that makes the comedy a form of love rather than condescension. Best in Show is the sharpest - the dog show and its entrants as a portrait of a particular strain of American aspiration and loneliness. The overnight gives you Altman's The Player (1992) at 3:15am, which is about Hollywood eating itself alive and is therefore the correct film to run after Guest's Hollywood satire.
Saturday, December 13th is Dick Van Dyke's 100th birthday, with the matinee running Bye Bye Birdie (1963), Mary Poppins (1964), and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) from noon to evening. Mary Poppins is the essential entry, and Van Dyke's accent is the most famous bad accent in film history and the film is still one of the most perfectly realized children's films ever made, and both of these things are equally true and one of them does not undermine the other. The joy in that film is real. The Rosie Perez Two for One at night pairs Kubrick's debut Killer's Kiss (1955) with Robert Wise's boxing noir The Harder They Fall (1956). Killer's Kiss is the film to see - Kubrick at 26, shot on location in New York, a bare-bones noir that already shows him thinking about visual composition in ways that the conventional genre films around it didn't.
Sunday, December 14th gives us The Gold Rush (1925) and The Great Dictator (1940) for Kid Fans in prime time. The Great Dictator deserves its own note, separate from the Kid Fans label: Chaplin's first sound film, made while Europe was at war and released in America while the country was still neutral, in which he plays both a Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomainia. The final speech - the Jewish barber who has been mistaken for Hynkel, standing before a microphone and addressing the world - is five minutes of Chaplin saying directly to camera everything he believed about fascism and human dignity, and it remains one of the most affecting things he ever put on screen. The TCM Imports give you two animated films: Watership Down (1978) and René Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973). The latter is the one I'd keep you up for - a French animated science fiction film about humans kept as pets by giant blue aliens, made with a visual imagination so strange and so complete that it still doesn't look like anything else. It's unsuitable for children despite being a cartoon and that's entirely its point.
~
Monday, December 15th is Art Deco Part 2: 42nd Street (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) - three Busby Berkeley films in a single evening, which is an overdose in the best possible way. I wrote about 42nd Street in the November Thanksgiving programming and I won't repeat myself. Footlight Parade is the one that has the best single number: "Shanghai Lil," in which Berkeley uses the overhead camera and human geometry to create something that looks like an Escher drawing given a pulse, and the sequence ends with a kaleidoscope of American flags formed by performers lying on their backs, moving their limbs. Patriotism as abstract art. It is extremely Berkeley and extremely 1933 and there is nothing else quite like it.
Tuesday, December 16th gives us Oberon with Olivier: Wuthering Heights (1939) at 8pm. The Merle Oberon/Laurence Olivier pairing is the one that made her a star, the film that Goldwyn produced and Wyler directed and which is still the most emotionally complete Wuthering Heights adaptation on film. Olivier's Heathcliff is one of the performances that made his reputation outside theater, and Oberon's Cathy is the more interesting performance - a woman who knows exactly what she's choosing between and chooses wrongly and spends the rest of her life inside that choice. The overnight gives you Ninotchka (1939) at 5am - Garbo's comedy, Lubitsch directing, and the most famous tag line in Hollywood history: "Garbo Laughs." She does, and it's worth staying up to hear.
Wednesday, December 17th is 250 Years of Jane Austen: Emma (1996), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Persuasion (1995), Pride and Prejudice (1940). The 1990s Austen revival is the subject here, and Sense and Sensibility at 10:15pm is the essential entry - Ang Lee directing Emma Thompson's screenplay, and Thompson simultaneously writing and starring in a film about a woman who has suppressed her own desires so completely that she has trouble recognizing them. The double consciousness required to play the character and to have written the character is visible in every scene she shares with Alan Rickman. Persuasion at 12:45am is the most underrated of the 1990s adaptations, Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds, and the most quietly devastating Austen story - about a woman who was persuaded away from the man she loved and who has spent eight years with the consequences of that persuasion.
Thursday, December 18th is the Divine Intervention Spotlight "Devilish Struggles": Heaven Can Wait (1943) at 8pm - the Lubitsch film, not the Warren Beatty remake - Angel on My Shoulder (1946) at 10pm, Cabin in the Sky (1943) at midnight. Cabin in the Sky is the essential entry, Vincente Minnelli's all-Black-cast musical about the competition between God and the Devil for a man's soul, with Ethel Waters and Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington's orchestra. It's a film that performs a very careful negotiation between its genuine talent and the limits of what Hollywood in 1943 would permit a Black-cast film to be, and Minnelli is most visible in the gap between what the material is capable of and what the industry constraints allowed. Still: Ethel Waters. Still: Lena Horne. Still: an all-Black cast in an MGM musical in 1943. The film deserves to be better known than it is.
~
Friday, December 19th - The Classic Christmas Marathon begins.
From this point through Christmas night, TCM is essentially running a continuous Christmas film marathon with only structural programming slots to interrupt it. I want to identify the essential films buried across seven days rather than trying to annotate the whole thing.
The marathon opens on the 19th with Holiday Affair (1949) at 8pm and The Shop Around the Corner (1940) at 9:45pm. The Shop Around the Corner is Lubitsch directing James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in the most warmly intelligent Christmas film ever made - two pen pals who fall in love through letters without knowing they're enemies in person, in a Budapest hat shop with winter outside the windows. It's the film that You've Got Mail was remade from, and the Lubitsch version is better in every particular because Lubitsch was not interested in sentimentality, he was interested in the mechanism by which people fall in love, and the mechanism here is very carefully observed.
Saturday, December 20th buries something important at 5:45am: The Apartment (1960). Billy Wilder's film is not a Christmas film in any conventional sense - it's a film about a corporation worker who lends his apartment to his superiors for their extramarital affairs and falls in love with one of their mistresses, and it ends with a card game and an interrupted suicide attempt and two people deciding, implicitly, to belong to each other. But it's set at Christmas. And it's one of the great American films, the film where Wilder's bitter comedy and his genuine romanticism find their most perfect balance, and Jack Lemmon in the best performance of his career and Shirley MacLaine in hers. 5:45am is an impossible time. Set an alarm if you don't own it.
Remember the Night (1940) at 8pm that same evening is the discovery of the Christmas Marathon: Preston Sturges writing (not directing), Mitchell Leisen directing, Barbara Stanwyck as a shoplifter whose trial is postponed by a sympathetic DA (Fred MacMurray, two decades before The Apartment would cast him as the same fundamental character in a different register) who impulsively brings her home to his family for Christmas. It sounds slight and it is instead one of the most emotionally precise films about what home means to people who don't have one. Stanwyck's performance is restrained in ways her better-known work rarely is, and the film has an ending that is as honest as it is heartbreaking. Almost nobody talks about it.
Sunday, December 21st runs Mon oncle Antoine (1971) at 2:45am, which is the greatest Canadian film ever made and which appears here, in the Christmas Marathon, because it's set at Christmas in a Quebec mining town and begins with a funeral and ends with one. Claude Jutra's film about a young boy who works in his uncle's general store and discovers, over a single Christmas holiday, that the adults around him are not what they appeared to be - that his uncle drinks, that his aunt's happiness is performed, that death is ordinary and near. It's a film about losing childhood's protection against the visible facts of adult life, and it does this with such specificity about a particular time and place that it becomes universal. Running it at 2:45am in a Christmas Marathon is burying one of the world's great films under the assumption that nobody is watching. Somebody should be.
The Christmas Marathon in its full form runs with continuous programming through Christmas night, covering The Bishop's Wife (1947), An Affair to Remember (1957), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) multiple times, The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941), Auntie Mame (1958), and dozens of other films. I'll name the ones I'd prioritize:
The Bishop's Wife (Christmas Eve, 8pm) - Cary Grant as an angel who helps an Episcopal bishop reconnect with what matters. Grant is more charming and more mysterious in this film than the plot strictly requires, and the film uses that surplus to suggest something about grace that it can't quite say directly.
A Matter of Life and Death (Christmas night, 8pm) - Powell and Pressburger's 1946 masterpiece about a British airman who survives what should have been his death, falls in love, and must argue before a heavenly tribunal for his right to remain alive. The film alternates between color (Earth) and black and white (Heaven), the inversion of Wings of Desire's logic, and it is one of the most beautiful and most philosophically serious films about love and mortality that cinema has produced. It is the correct film to anchor Christmas night. The Divine Intervention Spotlight has been building to this.
Meet Me in St. Louis (Christmas Eve at 12pm, Christmas morning at 11:30am) - Vincente Minnelli, Judy Garland, the Trolley Song, and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which Garland sings to Margaret O'Brien after O'Brien has destroyed her snow people in a grief tantrum, and which remains one of the most emotionally layered Christmas songs in the repertoire because the context makes the cheerfulness into something more complicated. The film is about a family that doesn't want to leave St. Louis, and the song is about putting a brave face on displacement, and Garland's vocal performance of that subtext is, as usual, exact.
~
Friday, December 26th is "In Memoriam: Not Previously Honored" - TCM paying tribute to figures who died since the last In Memoriam segment and weren't honored in the main tribute. The films represent the honorees: Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) for Robert Benton, Top Secret! (1984) for Val Kilmer, The Entertainer (1960) for Joan Plowright, Cool Hand Luke (1967) for Lalo Schifrin. The Plowright entry is worth lingering on: one of the greatest stage actresses of her generation, married to Olivier, a film career that never fully captured what she could do on stage but The Entertainer - Olivier's aging, failing music hall comedian and Plowright as the young woman who sees him clearly - is the exception. She's only in a portion of the film but she's better than almost everything around her.
Saturday, December 27th brings back the Robert Townsend Two for One: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and Network (1976). For those who've been reading since July - this is the same pairing that appeared on July 26th, which I flagged at the time as one of the more surprising combinations in the Two for One slot. I maintain my July assessment: these films are not natural companions, but the gap between them is itself interesting to think about. A fantasy about a boxer accidentally killed and given a second chance at life vs. a film in which the television industry industrializes death. Jordan's guardian angel would be appalled by what Beale's audience became. The Noir Alley gives us Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) - James Mason as a wounded IRA man bleeding to death across a single night in Belfast, and one of the most visually hallucinatory films Reed ever made. The overnight gives you the Maysles Brothers' Grey Gardens (1975) at 2:30am and Being There (1979) at 4:15am. Grey Gardens and Being There on the same overnight is accidental perfection - one film about a woman who built a complete inner world inside a collapsing house and never needed anything outside it; one film about a man with no inner world who became, by accident, a vessel for everyone else's projections. Two portraits of radical interiority, opposite in everything except their serenity.
Sunday, December 28th has Singin' in the Rain (1952) at 8pm for Kid Fans - the film I've mentioned multiple times across this year and will not stop recommending, simply the greatest American musical and one of the genuine contenders for the greatest Hollywood film of any genre. The TCM Imports close the night with both parts of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible - Part 1 (1944) at 2:45am and Part II: The Boyars' Plot (1946) at 4:30am. Eisenstein's last completed work, a historical epic about Ivan IV of Russia commissioned by Stalin, which became progressively more ambiguous about the czar as Eisenstein developed it - Part II was suppressed by Stalin after completion and not released until 1958, after Stalin's death, because it was too obviously about a leader who had grown paranoid and murderous. Running both parts on the same night is the correct way to see them; the formal ambition builds across both films, and the color sequence at the end of Part II - Eisenstein's first use of color - is one of the most extraordinary visual passages he ever created.
Monday, December 29th is Art Deco Part 3: Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936) in prime time, with Cukor's The Women (1939) at midnight. The Art Deco series ends where it probably should have begun - Astaire and Rogers, the RKO productions, the white sets and Art Deco geometry that was the visual grammar of the Fred and Ginger films. Swing Time is the better of the two, the one with "The Way You Look Tonight" and a sequence in which Astaire creates a shadow that dances independently of him, and it's the film that most directly uses the Art Deco visual vocabulary as an expression of what the dancing means rather than as backdrop. The Women at midnight is a film with an entirely female cast - not one man appears on screen - a bitchy, glorious comedy about marriage and divorce in wealthy Manhattan, and it is not what it appears to be because Cukor never made films that were what they appeared to be.
Tuesday, December 30th closes the Merle Oberon Star of the Month with "High Stakes" and "Later Roles." Berlin Express (1948) at 8pm, Night Song (1947) at 9:30, Hotel (1967) at 3am. The Star of the Month has traced a career arc across December that ends, appropriately, with the later roles that were smaller and stranger - a career that never quite found its full expression inside the industry that cast her, that required a fabricated identity to function within, and that TCM is honoring now, in December 2025, with the full complexity of that history on the table.
Wednesday, December 31st - New Year's Eve. Marx Brothers Madness in the daytime and then "New Beginnings" at night: Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) at 8pm, Only You (1994) at 10pm, Sleepless in Seattle (1993) at midnight, Diner (1982) at 2am, Metropolitan (1990) at 4am.
Sleepless in Seattle at midnight on New Year's Eve is TCM knowing exactly what it's doing - the radio segment in the film where Sam describes missing his wife and the country listens is one of the moments that defined what the early 1990s wanted from romantic movies, which is reassurance that love is real and survives loss. It's a comfort film in the best sense, which is the right sense for midnight on December 31st.
Diner at 2am and Metropolitan at 4am is the New Year's evening becoming thoughtful. Levinson's Diner is a film about young men in 1959 Baltimore who can't quite enter adulthood, who stay up all night talking about nothing important because the nothing-important conversation is the thing that keeps them connected to each other, and it's one of the most honest American films about male friendship in a period when that friendship is about to become impossible. Whit Stillman's Metropolitan at 4am is the same film in Manhattan in 1990, different class, same argument: a group of young people on the cusp of adulthood, talking all night, knowing the conversations are about to end. Both films are elegies for moments they're still inside. Both are the right films for the last hours of a year.
~
December 2025: The Superlatives
The Film of the Month: Wings of Desire (December 11, 1:45am). Angels in divided Berlin. Bruno Ganz wanting to be mortal. The moment color enters the frame. Find it regardless of the hour.
The Night of the Month: Christmas Night, December 25. A Matter of Life and Death (1946) at 8pm. Powell and Pressburger as the Divine Intervention Spotlight's culmination. Seventy-nine years old and as beautiful and serious as anything airing this December.
The Discovery of the Month: Remember the Night (December 20, 8pm). Preston Sturges writing, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, Christmas Eve, what home means to people who don't have one. Almost nobody talks about this film and they should.
The Hidden Treasure: Mon oncle Antoine (December 21, 2:45am). The greatest Canadian film ever made, buried at 2:45am in the Christmas Marathon. A boy losing his childhood's protection against the facts of adult life, at Christmas, in a mining town in Quebec. Stay up.
The Star of the Month Worth Thinking About: Merle Oberon. The early career films and the documentary running at 5am behind them. The industry that required her to fabricate her identity. The Star of the Month as reckoning.
The Double Feature That Works Best: Grey Gardens and Being There (December 27 overnight, 2:30am). One woman who built a world in a collapsing house. One man who was a vessel for everyone else's projections. Two kinds of serenity.
The Art Deco Night Worth Following: December 15. 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933 back to back. A night where the overhead camera and the human body in formation produce something that transcends spectacle.
The Guest Programmer Pick: Christopher Guest, December 12. Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, Spinal Tap. A complete statement about what the mockumentary form is actually doing when it's working.
The TCM Imports Sequence of the Month: Both parts of Ivan the Terrible (December 28, 2:45am and 4:30am). Eisenstein's last work, the film that got suppressed by Stalin, Part II's color sequence at the end. The Import catalog reaching back to 1944 and pulling something formally astonishing out of the archive.
The Christmas Marathon Essential: The Shop Around the Corner (December 19, 9:45pm). Lubitsch. Stewart and Sullavan. Two people who love each other through letters and hate each other in person. The most warmly intelligent Christmas film ever made.
~
This is the last monthly preview of the year, and I want to say something about what TCM did across 2025 that the individual months don't capture in total. The year included a five-film David Lynch tribute in July, the Edith Head Spotlight across September's Wednesdays, Angela Lansbury's 100th birthday in October, the Sirk/Hudson night in November, Paul Thomas Anderson and Aziz Ansari programming back-to-back months, the Donald Bogle Interracial Romance series in September, Wings of Desire at 1:45am in December, Mon oncle Antoine at 2:45am in the Christmas Marathon, Manila in the Claws of Light and Touki Bouki after the Redford memorial. The standard tribute nights and the genre themed Saturdays and the recurring Spotlights are the visible face of what TCM does. The films buried at 2am on Tuesday nights - the ones placed with apparent deliberateness, the ones that reward following the programming rather than just the schedule - are the less visible face, and it's the one I find myself most grateful for every year.
The year ends with Metropolitan at 4am on New Year's Eve, a group of young people talking all night at the end of something. That seems right. More next year.
