TCM Monthly Preview: February 2026
February is two months in one, divided almost exactly at its midpoint. The first twelve days have their own logic and their own pleasures: Black History Month programming anchors the Sundays, Bugs Bunny is legitimately the Star of the Month (I'll address this), the Lubitsch retrospective on February 9th is one of the best single programming nights of the year, and the thematic evenings in the first two weeks - a Goth Night, an Unrequited Love night, a Costume Party - are the kind of idiosyncratic mid-winter programming that TCM does well when it relaxes. Then, on February 13th, 31 Days of Oscar takes over completely, running categorized thematic blocks around the clock through March 7th. The two halves of the month require different reading strategies and I'll try to give each what it needs.
A note on Bugs Bunny as Star of the Month: I've been sitting with this for a month since the preview page ran and I've decided that it is correct. The format TCM uses - Looney Tunes shorts before and after a thematically paired feature film, "co-starring" credits for Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote - takes the subject completely seriously as a comedic filmmaker, which is the right way to take it. Chuck Jones directed What's Opera, Doc? (1957), which is seven minutes of Bugs and Elmer performing a Wagnerian tragedy in a miniature that is - I'm going to say this - as formally accomplished as almost anything in the feature film archive. The film has been added to the National Film Registry. It belongs on a Star of the Month slate the way Vertigo belongs on a Hitchcock retrospective. The February Mondays are structured around Bugs's recurring antagonists - Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Marvin the Martian, Wile E. Coyote - and the paired features are chosen with actual care: A Night at the Opera with the Elmer night, Beau Geste with the Yosemite Sam at sea night, The Roaring Twenties with the Rocky and Mugsy night. Someone at TCM had genuine fun with this. It shows.
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Sunday, February 1st opens Black History Month with Michael Schultz Part One: Cooley High (1975) at 8pm and Greased Lightning (1977) at 10pm. Schultz was one of the few Black directors working in mainstream Hollywood in the 1970s with consistent access to studio budgets, and Cooley High is his masterpiece - an autobiographical film about Black teenagers in Chicago in the early 1960s, modeled formally on American Graffiti but grounded in a social and economic reality that Lucas's nostalgic version of adolescence didn't include. It's one of the warmest and most honest films about being young in urban America that decade produced. The TCM Imports end the night with Bergman's The Magic Flute (1975) at 1:45am and Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) at 4:15am - two of the greatest films about performance and obsession, paired at the end of a Sunday night as if the programmers wanted to close with something that earned the quiet.
Monday, February 2nd is the first Bugs Bunny Star of the Month night: Elmer Fudd co-starring, opening with A Wild Hare (1940) - the film that introduced the "What's up, Doc?" formula and Bugs's fully formed persona - and Rabbit of Seville (1950) and What's Opera, Doc? (1957) as the evening's anchors. The Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera (1935) runs at 8:30pm as the primetime feature, which pairs with Bugs because both are about anarchic performers destroying the cultural pretensions of the institutions they're nominally participating in. Sam Wood directing Groucho, Harpo, and Chico at the opera; Jones directing Bugs at the opera; the comparison is not absurd. King Kong (1933) closes the overnight at 1:30am, and the "Co-Starring Gruesome Gorilla" category label that precedes it is TCM's best joke of the month.
Tuesday, February 3rd is Bugs vs. Yosemite Sam, and the overnight runs all three Frankenstein films: James Whale's original (1931), Fisher's Hammer version (1957), and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969). The Hammer Frankenstein progression is worth noting - Cushing's Baron Frankenstein becomes progressively more monstrous across the Hammer series, and Must Be Destroyed is the one where the film stops pretending he's a tragic scientist and lets him be simply evil, which is an interesting endpoint for a character that the 1931 original treated as a victim of his own ambition.
Wednesday, February 4th is Bugs vs. Marvin the Martian, with Invaders from Mars (1953) as the primetime feature and The Roaring Twenties (1939) after midnight, which is the Raoul Walsh film about a World War I veteran who becomes a bootlegger, Cagney and Bogart, and one of the most elegiac gangster films in the cycle - a film that knows the genre is mourning something even as it celebrates it. Carnegie Hall (1947) closes the overnight for anyone who wants to see what classical music concert films looked like before the form was codified.
Thursday, February 5th is Bugs vs. Wile E. Coyote, with Picnic (1955) as the primetime feature - one of the better-dressed studio films of the decade, and Kim Novak in the performance that should have made her an Oscar contender, a woman who is simultaneously an object of desire and fully aware of the costs of that status. Hamlet (1948) at 1:30am is the Olivier film, and there is something about programming Olivier's Hamlet at 1:30am on a night otherwise devoted to a cartoon rabbit that captures the spirit of the Star of the Month format exactly: TCM believing that the full range of what cinema has done is available at any hour and should be treated accordingly.
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Friday, February 6th runs Rabbit Fire (1951), Rabbit Seasoning (1952), and Duck! Rabbit, Duck! (1953) - the Duck Season/Rabbit Season trilogy, which is a genuine contribution to the theory of comedy. The three cartoons use the same premise (Bugs and Daffy arguing about which is in season while Elmer hunts them) in escalating variations, and together they constitute one of the most sustained explorations of the relationship between logic and absurdity in American comedy. Aristotle would have thoughts about the "duck season/rabbit season" exchange. Jones clearly did.
Saturday, February 7th has the Costume Party in prime time: Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion (2024) at 8pm and Pennies from Heaven (1981) at 10pm. Pennies from Heaven is Herbert Ross and Dennis Potter's American adaptation of Potter's landmark BBC series, Steve Martin in a dramatic role that his comedy career has completely overshadowed, a Depression-era sheet music salesman who fantasizes in show tunes, and the film uses color-saturated musical numbers that look like the period films the characters are fantasizing about against the gray naturalism of their actual lives. It's about the gap between what popular music promises and what life delivers. It failed commercially and remains one of the most interesting films that decade produced. Bernadette Peters. Christopher Walken dancing. See it.
Sunday, February 8th is Michael Schultz Part Two: Which Way Is Up? (1977) and Krush Groove (1985). The Silent Sunday Night gives you Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920) at midnight - the oldest surviving film by a Black director, made in direct response to Birth of a Nation, a film that restores Black humanity to American cinema with an urgency that makes it still feel present and necessary. Immediately followed at 1:30am by Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (2021), which is TCM doing exactly what the month calls for: the film and then the context, back to back.
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Monday, February 9th - The Lubitsch Night.
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) at 8pm, Broken Lullaby (1932) at 9:45, One Hour with You (1932) at 11:15pm, Trouble in Paradise (1932) at 12:45am, The Shop Around the Corner (1940) at 2:15am.
This is the best single night of February's first two weeks, and it may be the best-curated director retrospective night of the year. The lineup is organized to show Lubitsch's range across a two-year period that produced some of the most formally inventive sound comedies Hollywood made: The Smiling Lieutenant is the operetta, Chevalier in uniform, Miriam Hopkins and Claudette Colbert as the two women dividing him; Broken Lullaby is the film nobody associates with Lubitsch because it's a World War I drama about guilt and forgiveness and is made with the same formal grace as his comedies, which is worth understanding; One Hour with You is the musical comedy; and Trouble in Paradise is the masterpiece.
Trouble in Paradise at 12:45am is the film I'd stay up all night for if it required it. Two jewel thieves who fall in love and take jobs with a wealthy perfume heiress, and the film is about desire and theft and the ways people perform identity for the people they want to impress, and it has the single most elegant sustained comic construction of any film Lubitsch made - every scene has a secondary meaning, every line lands twice, and the film's final scene is one of the most perfectly resolved romantic conclusions in classical Hollywood cinema. The Hays Code eventually banned it from re-release for twenty years. Watch it and understand why.
Tuesday, February 10th is Goth Night: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) at 8pm, Bride of Frankenstein (1935) at 10pm, The Enchanted Cottage (1945) at 11:30pm, The Haunting (1963) at 3:30am. TCM returning The Haunting a month after its October appearance is the channel saying: yes, this is the film, keep finding it. I agree.
Wednesday, February 11th spotlights Walter Matthau: Lonely Are the Brave (1962) at 8pm and Charley Varrick (1973) at 10pm. Lonely Are the Brave is the essential entry - Kirk Douglas as a cowboy anachronism who refuses to accept that the West is gone, trying to escape across the modern highway system on horseback while being pursued by a sheriff (Matthau) who respects him and will catch him anyway. It's a film about the end of one American mythology and the indifference of what replaced it, and it's considerably more serious than its western packaging suggests. Charley Varrick at 10pm is Siegel directing Matthau as a crop duster who accidentally robs mob money from a small-town bank, and it's the best pure thriller of Matthau's career - a film that respects its audience's intelligence enough to let the plot work through logic rather than coincidence.
Thursday, February 12th is Unrequited Love: Doctor Zhivago (1965) at 8pm - all three hours of it - Wuthering Heights (1939) at 11:30pm, Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) at 1:30am, Splendor in the Grass (1961) at 3:30am. The February 12th Unrequited Love night into Valentine's Day is the correct programming decision in the same way that following a Christmas film marathon with Buñuel was the correct programming decision - TCM understanding that the expected tone and the subversive alternative are both available and that offering the latter is a form of respect. Splendor in the Grass at 3:30am is Elia Kazan, Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, adolescent desire and what happens when adults manage it into damage, and it's one of the most honest American films about sexuality and repression of its decade. The ending is one of the great sad endings. Valentine's Day arrives just after.
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Friday, February 13th - 31 Days of Oscar begins.
From this point through March 7th, the schedule is organized entirely by thematic category: Oscar Goes to a Fantasy World, Oscar Goes to a Wedding, Oscar Goes to Paris, Oscar Goes Bad, and so on, cycling through the clock continuously. I've been through the full schedule and I want to do what I did with the Christmas Marathon - identify the essential categories and the individual films buried where you might not look, rather than trying to annotate 23 consecutive days of themed programming.
The format first: each day typically runs two themed blocks, one for the afternoon/early evening and one for the prime-time slot onward. The categories are pleasingly specific - Oscar Goes Nuclear, Oscar Goes to the Dogs, Oscar Goes for a Drive - and the specificity is the fun. When you've seen enough of these, you start playing the game yourself: what would Oscar Goes to a Laundromat look like? (Answer: probably My Beautiful Laundrette at midnight with Coin-Op as a double feature that doesn't exist.)
The nights worth restructuring your evening around:
February 13th - Oscar Goes to a Wedding (8pm): Father of the Bride (1950), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), The Graduate (1967) at midnight. The Graduate is the essential entry here, though "Oscar Goes to a Wedding" is a deliberately ironic label for a film about a man who ruins a wedding. Nichols' debut, Dustin Hoffman's debut, the shot of Benjamin on the bus with Katherine Ross at the end where neither of them is smiling and the Simon & Garfunkel stops and you realize the film has refused to give you the victory it spent two hours building toward. The ending is one of the most honest moments in 1960s American cinema.
February 14th - Oscar Goes to Paris (Valentine's Day, all day): The lineup runs from Ninotchka (1939) at 10am through Casablanca at noon, An American in Paris (1951) at 8pm, Moulin Rouge! (2001) at 10pm, Amélie (2001) at 12:15am, Irma La Douce (1963) at 2:30am. Running this on Valentine's Day is TCM at its most obvious and most correct - obvious because Paris and Valentine's Day is the expected combination, correct because the selection goes further than expected. Irma La Douce at 2:30am is Wilder and Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine as a Parisian prostitute, and it is the most generous film Wilder made - generous toward its characters, toward human weakness, toward the accommodations people make with the facts of their lives. It's not as celebrated as his other films from this period and it's better than some of them. Casablanca at noon is the correct time to watch Casablanca on Valentine's Day, before sentiment has time to harden into obligation.
February 15th - Oscar Goes Bad (all day): This is the best single day in 31 Days of Oscar. Little Caesar (1931) at 7am, Double Indemnity (1944) at noon, Rear Window (1954) at 4pm, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) at 6pm, White Heat (1949) at 8pm, In Cold Blood (1967) at 10pm, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) at 12:30am, Shaft (1971) at 2:45am. The prime-time sequence from Bonnie and Clyde through Dog Day Afternoon is twelve hours of the American crime film from 1930 to 1975, and the progression - the classical period giving way to the Production Code compromise giving way to the post-Code realism - maps the genre's development as clearly as any film history course. White Heat at 8pm is Cagney at the absolute edge of what the studio system would permit - his Cody Jarrett is genuinely mentally ill, genuinely dangerous, the famous "Top of the world, Ma!" ending the most thoroughly committed performance of psychotic grandiosity in the classical era.
February 17th - Oscar Goes Nuclear (8pm): On the Beach (1959), The China Syndrome (1979), Dr. Strangelove (1964) at 12:45am, Seven Days to Noon (1950) at 2:30am. The nuclear night, and the essential sequence is The China Syndrome into Dr. Strangelove - the earnest warning and the satirical one, back to back, the two ways American cinema has tried to process the fact of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, arriving at opposite formal conclusions and at the same dread. Seven Days to Noon at 2:30am is the British entry, a nuclear scientist who has stolen a bomb and threatens London unless disarmament begins, and it's the most procedurally honest film in the sequence - a government and police force actually trying to solve a problem, rather than the institutional failure that the other three films are about.
February 18th - Oscar Goes on Stage / Oscar Goes to England: Stage Door (1937) at 8:30am, To Be or Not to Be (1942) at noon, The Entertainer (1960) at 3:45pm, then My Fair Lady (1964) at 8pm, The Remains of the Day (1993) at 11pm. The Remains of the Day is the entry that gets undervalued in any lineup - James Ivory directing the Ishiguro adaptation, Anthony Hopkins as a butler so completely defined by his professional function that he has suppressed everything human about himself, and Emma Thompson as the housekeeper who loves him and cannot reach him. It's one of the most quietly devastating films about English repression and what repression costs, and the final scene - Stevens watching the evening light fall and understanding, for a moment, what he gave away - is Hopkins giving the best performance of his career in a single sustained close-up.
February 19th - Oscar Goes for the Facts (Documentaries): The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) at 4pm, Inside Job (2010) at 6pm. These are the two I'd flag from the documentary afternoon. The Times of Harvey Milk is Rob Epstein's Academy Award-winning documentary about the first openly gay elected official in American history and his assassination, and it remains one of the most emotionally complete political documentaries ever made - the film that established what the form could accomplish when personal and political history were inseparable. Inside Job at 6pm is the corrective to any lingering faith in financial institution regulation, and it remains as infuriating in 2026 as it was when it won the Oscar in 2011.
February 21st - Oscar Goes Big (Epics): Ben-Hur (1959) at 7:30am, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) at 11:30am, Gone With the Wind (1939) at 8pm, Doctor Zhivago (1965) at midnight. One Saturday. Four films that together run approximately fifteen hours. This is the day where you decide how serious you are about the 31 Days of Oscar. Lawrence of Arabia at 11:30am is the one I'd build the day around - Lean and Bolt and O'Toole, the most visually ambitious film in the British cinema's history, a film about a man who becomes a myth without fully becoming himself, and the desert photography is still as overwhelming as it was in 1962. The IMAX restoration has made it available in something approaching its original scale; TCM can't give you that scale, but it can give you the film, which is still enough.
February 22nd - Oscar Goes to War: The essential sequence is The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) at 5pm, Patton (1970) at 8pm, The Deer Hunter (1978) at 11pm, Das Boot (1981) at 2:15am. These four films together constitute the best anti-war night in the 31 Days programming - not because they're all explicitly anti-war, but because each one takes the material seriously enough to show what war actually does to the people inside it. Das Boot at 2:15am is the German film that required three and a half hours for the theatrical cut and still feels compressed - a U-boat crew on a mission that the film refuses to ennoble, and Wolfgang Petersen directing the claustrophobia with a technical precision that has never been equaled in submarine films.
February 24th - Oscar Goes Back for More (Remakes): Gaslight (1944) at 8pm, Imitation of Life (1959) at 10pm, A Star Is Born (1976) at 2:30am. The Streisand/Kristofferson A Star Is Born at 2:30am is the one remake that equals its predecessors rather than serving as a footnote, and Kris Kristofferson's self-destruction in that film is more specific and more real than almost any rock-and-roll performance in cinema. The film earned its Oscar nominations and the distance between its reputation then and now is one of the more interesting shifts in critical consensus of the last fifty years.
February 25th - Oscar Goes to Church: Going My Way (1944) at 8pm, Elmer Gantry (1960) at 10:15, A Man for All Seasons (1966) at 1am. Elmer Gantry is the one the category was built around - Burt Lancaster as the revival preacher and con artist, an Oscar-winning performance of charismatic manipulation that remains one of the great American performances about the intersection of genuine belief and calculated fraud. Sinclair Lewis wrote the original novel; Richard Brooks adapted and directed it; Lancaster embodied it with a conviction that makes you understand exactly how Gantry works on his congregations, because he works on the audience in the same way.
February 26th - Oscar Goes to Italy (8pm): Roman Holiday (1953), A Room with a View (1985), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) at 12:30am, Death in Venice (1971) at 3am. The sequence from Ripley through Death in Venice is the most serious portion of the 31 Days programming's Italian night - both films about men who have desired something in Italy that Italy refused to give them, and both about the violence that desire eventually does when it cannot find its object. Death in Venice at 3am is Visconti adapting Thomas Mann, Dirk Bogarde as Aschenbach watching a beautiful boy across a Venetian beach while the cholera arrives, and the film is so formally precise about the relationship between art, beauty, and mortality that it remains singular in Visconti's career and in the Italian cinema of the 1970s.
February 27th - Oscar Goes to Court (8pm): 12 Angry Men (1957), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) at midnight, Adam's Rib (1949) at 3:15am. This is my candidate for best single prime-time block in 31 Days of Oscar. Three films about how the courtroom works as a theatrical space - Lumet's film about a jury room, Wilder's film about a courtroom as a stage where the real crime is a performance inside a performance, and Stanley Kramer's film about the courtroom that was asked to decide whether civilization had the capacity to judge its own atrocities. Together they constitute the most complete statement about American and international law that the film catalog can make. Witness for the Prosecution at 9:45pm is the Christie adaptation that requires you to see it before anyone tells you the ending, and if you haven't: don't let anyone tell you.
February 28th - Oscar Goes West: The lineup runs all day and reaches its most interesting configuration at night: Shane (1953) at 8pm, Hondo (1953) at 10:15, McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) at 11:45pm, The Wild Bunch (1969) at 2am. The four films together chart the Western's trajectory from the classical apogee (Shane, the most formally complete classical western) to the revisionist deconstruction (McCabe, Altman and Zsigmond making a Western about capitalism rather than heroism, filmed in mud and rain and early-winter light that makes it look like the frontier was always already ending) to the genre's operatic self-immolation (The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah building to a final battle that is both beautiful and appalling in exactly equal measure). This is a night about a genre confronting its own mythology and surviving the encounter differently each time.
Sunday, March 1st - Oscar Goes Dancing: West Side Story (1961) at 8pm, All That Jazz (1979) at 10:45pm, The Red Shoes (1948) at 1am. I've mentioned The Red Shoes in this year's previews and I'll say it one more time: Powell and Pressburger, Moira Shearer, a film about what art demands of the body and what happens when you try to stop giving it. The 17-minute ballet sequence at the center of the film is the most sustained piece of cinema as dance that has ever been made. Running it at 1am on the last Sunday of the 31 Days programming, after West Side Story and All That Jazz have preceded it, is the right ending to a week that started with the Oscars going to a fantasy world on February 13th.
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February 2026: The Superlatives
The Night of the Month: February 27 - Oscar Goes to Court. 12 Angry Men, Witness for the Prosecution, Judgment at Nuremberg. The law as theater, the law as justice, the law as the last available instrument against barbarism. The best prime-time block in 31 Days of Oscar.
The Day to Build the Month Around: February 15 - Oscar Goes Bad. White Heat at 8pm, In Cold Blood at 10pm, Dog Day Afternoon at 12:30am. The American crime film across four decades in a single day.
The Film of the Month: Trouble in Paradise (February 9, 12:45am). Lubitsch at his most precise. Every line landing twice. The most elegant comic construction in classical Hollywood cinema.
The Lubitsch Night: February 9, full stop. Five films, two years of work, a career's range compressed into one evening. Trouble in Paradise at 12:45am is the destination but The Shop Around the Corner at 2:15am is the grace note.
The Rediscovery of the Month: Pennies from Heaven (February 7, 10pm). Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Herbert Ross, Dennis Potter. The gap between what popular music promises and what life delivers, filmed in the colors of the dreams and the gray of the reality. Failed commercially. Deserves its revival.
The Western Night Worth Staying Up For: February 28 - Shane into McCabe & Mrs. Miller into The Wild Bunch. The genre's classical high point, its revisionist correction, and its operatic death, in sequence.
The Star of the Month Pick: What's Opera, Doc? (1957), every time it runs. Seven minutes. National Film Registry. The only correct response to the question "what should a Star of the Month look like?"
The Unrequited Love Entry: Splendor in the Grass (February 12, 3:30am). Kazan, Wood, Beatty, Wordsworth. The most honest American film about adolescent desire and what adults do to it. The ending.
The 31 Days of Oscar Hidden Entry: The Remains of the Day (February 18, 11pm). Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, the evening light, what he gave away. In any other week it would anchor a night. Here it runs at 11pm on a Wednesday and then the programming continues.
The Final TCM Imports Pick of the Year: The Red Shoes (February 1, 4:15am). The oldest entry in the Imports' February catalog and the best argument the program makes all month for staying up.
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To end this post, I want to say something briefly about what TCM does that I don't think the individual months fully capture in accumulation. Every month has its essential nights and its buried treasures and its guest programmers with their personal confessions disguised as film lists. But what I notice, writing about the programming month by month, is the cumulative argument: the channel believes that the full range of cinema - the Looney Tunes short and the Tarkovsky, the Christmas musical and the Oscar Micheaux, the Busby Berkeley overhead shot and the Das Boot submarine - belongs in the same catalog, airs in the same schedule, and can find the same audience at different hours of the night. It is not a curatorial argument you could make with words. It requires actually programming it, week after week, and trusting that someone is watching.
And let me make it clear: Someone is watching. It may be a 24-year-old film fan who loves writing about these movies for a blog called Classic Film Chronicles, or it may be someone in their 90s who can remember seeing many of these movies in theaters. The eclecticism of us, the viewers, matches the variety of TCM’s programming. You have The Red Shoes at 4:15am on a Sunday in February. Mon oncle Antoine at 2:45am in the Christmas Marathon. Wings of Desire at 1:45am in December, after Oh, God! Touki Bouki at 4am in November, after the Redford memorial. The Murder of Fred Hampton at 3:45am on MLK Day. TCM is full of these moments. The argument they make, month after month, is that cinema is large enough to hold everything - the most beautiful, the most difficult, the most buried, the most obvious - and that 4am is not too late for something that matters. I find that to be beautiful.
See you in March.
