TCM Monthly Preview: January 2026
January arrives with two losses to absorb and one of the most politically committed single days of programming the channel has ever assembled. The Diane Keaton Memorial Tribute lands on the 25th, a Sunday built around a career that reshaped what American actresses were allowed to do on screen. And quietly, on the 26th, TCM has scheduled the Paul Newman birthday tribute that the December preview page showed coming - and given the guest programmer slot to sculptor Michael Kalish, whose list turns out to be the strangest and most personal guest programmer choice of the year.
The structural elements: Jean Arthur is Star of the Month, finally, which is long overdue, and the Thursdays do her real justice. The Flashback Fridays Spotlight returns for a second month and gets stronger as it goes - the January 9th noir night is one of the best single-night Spotlight entries of the year. The Working Class Special Theme continues from December on Tuesdays and reaches its most serious week on the 27th, Holocaust Remembrance Day, with a British New Wave sequence that is quietly devastating. The 1970s New York night on the 21st gives you Mean Streets, Shaft, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three in sequence, which is a portrait of a city as complete as any documentary. And MLK Day on the 19th runs from 6am to dawn with a scope and seriousness that most television channels won't attempt on any day, let alone a holiday.
One more thing before we begin: the month ends on the 31st with Jon Voight programming Deliverance and Midnight Cowboy, which I will address when we get there because there is something genuinely complicated about it.
~
Thursday, January 1st opens the new year with the Jean Arthur Star of the Month: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) at 8pm, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) at 10:15, You Can't Take It with You (1938) at 12:30am. Three Capra films in a row, which is one way to begin a year, and the argument implicit in putting all three on the same night is that Arthur was the through-line that made the Capra worldview legible. Gary Cooper and James Stewart get the credit in memory; Arthur is the person who made you believe both men were worth believing in. Her quality - the catch in her voice, the way she could be simultaneously brittle and open, the sense of a woman who had decided to be undefended and was paying the cost of it - grounded the idealism of both films in something human enough to sustain it.
Friday, January 2nd opens the Flashback Fridays Spotlight. Citizen Kane (1941) at 8pm, Rashomon (1950) at 10:15, Sophie's Choice (1982) at midnight, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) at 2:45am. The Spotlight theme is "flashback" as formal device rather than genre - films structured around unreliable retrospection - and the Kane/Rashomon pairing in the first two hours is a film school seminar compressed into an evening. Kane tells one story as remembered by multiple people; Rashomon tells multiple stories as remembered by the same event's participants; both films conclude that the truth is either inaccessible or nonexistent, and both arrive there through radically different visual grammars. Sophie's Choice at midnight is the Spotlight taking the theme into its most anguishing register - a woman's memory of an impossible choice, told in nested flashbacks, and Meryl Streep's performance of the act of remembering is as extraordinary as the performance of the memory itself.
Saturday, January 3rd brings the '50s Sci-Fi night in the prime time slot: When Worlds Collide (1951), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). I've mentioned these films in passing across the year but want to flag Attack of the 50 Foot Woman for a reason that requires taking the film slightly more seriously than it was made. Nancy Archer as a woman whose husband's infidelities and society's dismissal of her wealth-and-beauty combination drives her, through alien intervention, to a literal physical enormity that finally makes her impossible to overlook - it's an accidental feminist fable, produced by people who had no such intentions, and the accident is more interesting than many deliberate arguments. The Noir Alley gives us The Second Woman (1950), Robert Young and Betsy Drake, a man being systematically gaslit by someone destroying his property to make him think he's losing his mind - a neat inversion of the standard noir gender dynamic.
Sunday, January 4th runs the Barry Levinson double feature: Rain Man (1988) and Avalon (1990). Avalon is the less-seen film and the more emotionally complete one - Levinson's semi-autobiographical account of a Jewish immigrant family in Baltimore from the 1920s through to the 1970s, and the film is about what assimilation costs in terms of cohesion, what television did to family gathering, and what is lost when a story stops being told at the dinner table. It's elegiac in ways Rain Man isn't, and it deserves to be better known. The TCM Imports return Manila in the Claws of Light and Touki Bouki for anyone who missed them in November - TCM reprogramming these until someone finally stays up for them, which is the right impulse.
Tuesday, January 6th is the Working Class Special Theme, "True Stories": Norma Rae (1979) at 8pm, Silkwood (1983) at 10:15, Matewan (1987) at 12:45am, North Country (2005) at 3am, Salt of the Earth (1954) at 5:30am. This is the Working Class theme at its most politically serious, and the calendar context is the kind of thing that makes you wonder who at TCM knows exactly what they're doing. Five films about American workers attempting to organize against corporate and political resistance, running through the night of a date with its own political history. Salt of the Earth at 5:30am is the film that most deserves the late-night recovery - made by blacklisted filmmakers with Mexican-American workers as cast and subject, about a New Mexico zinc mine strike, and suppressed by the industry for decades after its completion. It is one of the most radical films ever made in the United States and it runs at 5:30am in January because that's where it ends up.
Thursday, January 8th continues the Jean Arthur Star of the Month with the lesser-known titles: Easy Living (1937) at 8pm, History is Made at Night (1937) at 9:45, The Whole Town's Talking (1935) at 11:45pm. Easy Living is Preston Sturges writing (not yet directing), Mitchell Leisen directing, and it's one of the best screwball comedies of the decade - a sable coat thrown from a window lands on Jean Arthur's head and ruins her life in ways that gradually become wonderful. The Sturges voice is already fully formed: the pure mechanism of a situation spiraling, the way a single arbitrary event can determine an entire life's direction, the comedy of a universe that is indifferent but not malicious. Arthur is perfectly suited to the material because her quality - that defenseless openness - is exactly what screwball comedy needs to function.
Friday, January 9th is the Flashback Fridays noir night, and it is the best Spotlight entry of the month. The Locket (1946) at 8pm, Double Indemnity (1944) at 10pm, The Killers (1946) at midnight, Mildred Pierce (1945) at 2am, D.O.A. (1950) at 4am. Five noirs in a row, all structured around retrospection - The Locket is a film that goes three flashbacks deep (a story within a story within a story) to reveal its femme fatale's pathology; Double Indemnity is Neff narrating his own murder into a Dictaphone as he bleeds to death; Mildred Pierce begins with a murder and tells you what led to it in reverse; D.O.A. opens with a man reporting his own murder to the police. The Spotlight is making an argument about noir's relationship with retrospection - the way the form is constitutionally about looking back at what went wrong, about a tense where consequence precedes explanation - and the five-film sequence is one of the more coherent programming arguments TCM makes all year. Stay for The Killers at midnight: Siodmak's opening sequence, Burt Lancaster lying in bed waiting to be murdered and not running, one of the most quietly shocking images of male passivity in the genre.
Sunday, January 11th spotlights Melina Mercouri: Never on Sunday (1960) at 8pm and Topkapi (1964) at 9:45. Mercouri was the Greek actress who became a national cultural icon - she was later Culture Minister of Greece and began the international campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles - and Never on Sunday is the film that made her internationally famous, Jules Dassin directing her as Ilya, a Piraeus prostitute who loves life and Greek tragedy simultaneously and is cheerfully resistant to all attempts to improve her. It won her a Cannes Best Actress. It should have won her an Oscar. The TCM Imports give you Umberto D. (1952) at 3:15am - De Sica's heartbreaking film about an elderly pensioner trying to preserve his dignity while the social systems around him fail, and his dog, and the two of them together constituting one of the most affecting portraits of old age and poverty that the cinema has produced.
~
Monday, January 19th - MLK Day.
The full day of programming runs from 6am to dawn, and it is the most comprehensively serious single-day thematic programming in the month. Edge of the City (1957) at 6am, Intruder in the Dust (1949) at 7:30am, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) at 2:30pm, King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis (1970) at 4:30pm, Malcolm X (1992) at 10pm, Uptight (1968) at 1:30am, The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971) at 3:45am.
I want to name what TCM is doing here because it deserves to be named. The programming traces a history rather than just an icon - it begins before the movement, moves through the filmed record of King's campaigns, reaches Spike Lee's Malcolm X at 10pm as the counterpoint and the alternative and the road not taken, and then, after midnight, arrives at the documents of what happened to the people who pushed harder. Uptight (1968) - Jules Dassin adapting The Informer into a Black Power story made the year King was assassinated, Ruby Dee in the film I wrote about in August - is the hinge between the King films and the post-midnight radicalism. The Murder of Fred Hampton at 3:45am is the activist documentary about the Black Panther leader murdered by Chicago police and the FBI, and it is not a comfortable film to air and TCM is airing it at 3:45am on MLK Day and that is a deliberate choice.
The programming says: here is what the holiday is celebrating, here is what it was in struggle, here is what it cost, here is what was done to the people who pushed beyond its limits. It is a fuller account of the history than most channels attempt on any day.
Tuesday, January 20th is the Patricia Neal 100th Birthday Tribute, and the Working Class theme anchors it with On the Waterfront (1954) at 8pm and A Place in the Sun (1951) at 10pm. I wrote about Neal at length in the August Summer Under the Stars entry - her performance in Hud as the essential Hud entry, the clarity she brought to women who see clearly inside men's self-mythology. The birthday tribute is paired with Working Class Dramas, which is a choice that reflects what Neal actually was: not a glamour actress but a precision instrument for depicting women in contact with brutal social realities. Blue Collar (1978) at 12:15am is Paul Schrader's debut, three auto workers who rob their union's safe and discover it contains evidence of corruption, and it's one of the most formally controlled and ideologically honest films about American labor ever made.
Wednesday, January 21st is 1970s New York night: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) at 8:30pm, Mean Streets (1973) at 11pm, Shaft (1971) at 1am, The American Friend (1977) at 3am. A new documentary, Song of My City (2025), runs three times as bracketing material - at 8pm before the main program and at 10:30pm and 5:30am after.
This is the night I'd build the week around. The three fiction films together constitute the most complete portrait of New York in crisis that American cinema assembled across a decade when the city was literally burning - the subway under Walter Matthau's transit police in Pelham, the Little Italy streets under Scorsese's naturalism in Mean Streets, Harlem under Gordon Parks' first studio feature. All three are about men navigating systems - transit, crime, urban streets - that have broken down or been captured by forces indifferent to the people inside them. Wenders' The American Friend at 3am is the German outsider's view of the same city, Bruno Ganz as a Hamburg frame-maker recruited into crime, and the film has a tourist's precise observation of the specific quality of American violence that the insider films can't achieve.
Thursday, January 22nd continues the Jean Arthur Star of the Month with The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), The More the Merrier (1943), A Foreign Affair (1948). The More the Merrier is the essential entry - Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea in wartime Washington, a housing shortage, a retired millionaire who rents half her apartment, a comedy that is also quietly an argument about class and community. Charles Coburn won the Oscar for Supporting Actor. Arthur should have been nominated.
Friday, January 23rd is the Flashback Fridays romance edition: A Letter to Three Wives (1949) at 8pm, Casablanca (1942) at 10pm, Brief Encounter (1945) at midnight. Three films about the past operating on the present - three wives wondering which of them their errant friend has run away with; Rick remembering Paris; Laura and Alec meeting again on a train platform. Brief Encounter at midnight is the placement that earns its position. David Lean, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, a relationship that never becomes physical and exists entirely in the tension between what two people want and what they allow themselves to have, and it is one of the most brutally honest depictions of desire and self-abnegation in the British cinema. Celia Johnson's face throughout the film is a masterclass in performing interiority - you see every thought she decides not to act on. The Rachmaninoff piano concerto under it all. The ending at the station. January at midnight is the correct time to see this.
~
Saturday, January 24th - Amy Madigan guest programmer: Twice in a Lifetime (1985) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Madigan starred in the former - Bud Yorkin's film about a working-class family disrupted when the father (Gene Hackman) falls in love with another woman (Ann-Margret), and the mother (Ellen Burstyn) and daughter (Madigan) who must decide how to rebuild their lives. It's a film almost nobody discusses now and it has performances from all four of its leads that deserve sustained attention. Madigan programming it alongside Baby Jane is a programmer saying: here is the film I'm most connected to, and here is the film that terrified me, and let the audience do what it will with that. It's a more personal guest programmer list than almost any this year.
Sunday, January 25th - Diane Keaton Memorial Tribute.
Reds (1981) at 2:30pm, Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) at 6pm, Annie Hall (1977) at 8pm, Baby Boom (1987) at 10pm. Father of the Bride (1991) runs at 2:30pm alongside Reds, which I take to mean they run in sequence.
Annie Hall is the film where Keaton did what nobody had done before, which was to play a woman who was genuinely, recognizably present in the way that real people are present - uncertain, digressive, enthusiastic about things, uncomfortable in ways she wasn't hiding. Alvy Singer is the film's ostensible subject and the more comprehensively drawn character, but Annie Hall is the film's life. Every scene she's in has a spontaneous quality that Woody Allen was famously skilled at drawing out of her, and the famous scene where she orders a pastrami on white bread with mayonnaise is both the film's comedic peak and its character revelation - a woman who knows what she likes and is unapologetic about it. She won the Oscar for the role. It changed what American actresses were understood to be capable of.
Reds at 2:30pm is Keaton giving the performance of her career: Louise Bryant, radical journalist and lover of John Reed, a woman whose intellectual and personal independence is both her strength and the source of her suffering, and the film is four hours long and she is present and specific in every frame of it. Beatty produces and directs and stars opposite her and he clearly understood what he had, because the camera never stops paying attention to her face. Baby Boom at 10pm is the counterpart in a lighter register - Keaton as a Manhattan executive whose life is disrupted by an inherited baby, a film that is ostensibly a comedy and actually a fairly honest analysis of what the 1980s asked women to give up in order to have careers.
The TCM Imports give you Toshiro Mifune in Hiroshi Teshigahara's Pitfall (1962) at 2:15am and Woman in the Dunes (1964) at 4am. Woman in the Dunes is one of the great films of the Japanese New Wave, a man who misses his bus and is trapped in a sand pit with a woman who must shovel sand constantly to prevent the village above from collapsing, and the film is about the conditions of ordinary human life presented in a surrealist register that never lets you settle into metaphor. It's genuinely disorienting and genuinely beautiful and it shows up in January at 4am on the Sunday of the Keaton memorial, and that's where it will find whoever is ready for it.
Monday, January 26th - Paul Newman Birthday Tribute / Michael Kalish Guest Programmer.
The guest programmer night is Rebel Without a Cause (1955) at 8pm, Blue Hawaii (1961) at 10pm, The Maltese Falcon (1941) at midnight, The Apartment (1960) at 1:45am, Days of Wine and Roses (1962) at 4am.
Michael Kalish is a sculptor - most famous for working in aluminum cans, including large-scale portrait sculptures of Muhammad Ali and others - not a filmmaker. TCM giving the guest programmer slot to a visual artist rather than a director or actor produces the most idiosyncratic and most honest-feeling list the slot has had all year. The films are: a James Dean film, an Elvis Presley film, the Bogart Maltese Falcon, a Lemmon/MacLaine/Wilder film, and the Jack Lemmon/Lee Remick alcoholism film.
Viewed as a sculptor's list, what connects them is the physical performance - James Dean and Elvis both occupying the camera with their bodies in ways that were unprecedented; Bogart's stillness as its own kind of presence; Lemmon's ability to make deterioration visible through physical specificity. Kalish sees actors the way a sculptor sees form, which is as the organization of space and attention. Days of Wine and Roses at 4am is the most serious entry - Lemmon's alcoholism gradually destroying his wife and himself, and a performance in which the physical comedy skills that made him famous are turned toward depicting physical compulsion, the body that has been recruited by something outside the will. It's one of the most important performances he gave.
Tuesday, January 27th is the Working Class theme on Holocaust Remembrance Day: "Growing Up Working Class" with How Green Was My Valley (1941) at 8pm, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) at 10:15, Kes (1969) at 12:15am, Bicycle Thieves (1948) at 2:15am, This Sporting Life (1963) at 4am, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) at 6:30am.
This is the Working Class theme's best night, and one of the best single programming nights in January. The night after MLK Day, the night of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the films are: a Welsh coal mining community's destruction, a gay Pakistani man and his white British lover running a laundromat in Thatcher's London, a Yorkshire boy and a kestrel, a father and son's bicycle stolen in postwar Rome, a rugby player who can't escape where he came from, a borstal runner who refuses to win. All six films are about the experience of class as a physical condition - the way it lives in the body, limits the future, and shapes what small freedoms are available and how much they cost. Kes at 12:15am is the essential entry: Ken Loach's 1969 film about a boy in a South Yorkshire mining town who trains a kestrel, and the film is the most precise depiction of what it feels like to be a child with intelligence and no environment to develop it in, and the ending is one of the most quietly devastating things in British cinema. Running it in the dead of January on Holocaust Remembrance Day is TCM connecting two kinds of obliteration: the systematic and the structural, the spectacular and the ordinary.
Wednesday, January 28th is the Sean Connery night: The Hill (1965) at 8pm, The Wind and the Lion (1975) at 10:15, The Offence (1973) at 12:30am, The Man Who Would Be King (1975) at 2:30am. The Hill is Sidney Lumet directing Connery against his Bond image in the most explicitly anti-authoritarian performance of his early career - a British military prison in North Africa, a man who resists the abuse systematically practiced by the guards, and Connery playing hardness as principle rather than as style. The Offence at 12:30am is the film he made specifically to prove he was an actor and not a movie star, and it works: a detective who beats a suspected child molester to death during interrogation, and the film's examination of the violence inside the man who enforces the law, directed by Lumet again. Almost nobody has seen it.
~
Saturday, January 31st - the Jon Voight Two for One: Deliverance (1972) at 8pm and Midnight Cowboy (1969) at 10pm.
I said I would address this and I will. Voight's public political statements in recent years have made him a genuinely complicated figure to celebrate, and the question of what it means for TCM to give him a programming slot in January 2026 is not one I can fully answer. What I can say is this: Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance are two of the most important American films of their decade, and Voight in both films is doing something that his subsequent career and his public persona make hard to see clearly, which is playing a kind of American innocence that is simultaneously genuine and catastrophically dangerous.
Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy is a man who has invented a version of himself that has no relationship with his actual history and goes to New York City to sell it. He is wrong about everything, capable of kindness, and the friendship with Ratso Rizzo is one of the great depictions of how two people can keep each other alive through the winter until the winter is over. Voight's performance is open in ways that require vulnerability, and the film treats its subjects - poverty, sex work, male intimacy - with a directness that American cinema has rarely matched before or since. Deliverance is the counterpart and the correction: American masculinity taken to the wilderness, tested, revealed as inadequate to what the wilderness reveals about it. Both films are about men who have been constructed by myths and found wanting. The fact that the man who played them has since embraced a different mythology doesn't make the films less true. The Noir Alley gives us Talk About a Stranger (1952), a small B-picture about a boy convinced his neighbor is a murderer, and it is a far better film than its obscurity suggests - a study of the paranoia available to childhood, directed with quiet precision.
~
January 2026: The Superlatives
The Day You Can't Miss: MLK Day, January 19. King: A Filmed Record at 4:30pm, Malcolm X at 10pm, The Murder of Fred Hampton at 3:45am. The full account, not just the holiday.
The Night of the Month: January 9 - the Flashback Fridays noir sequence. The Locket, Double Indemnity, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, D.O.A. - five films, one argument about memory and consequence. The best Spotlight night of the year.
The Night Worth Building the Week Around: January 21 - 1970s New York. Pelham One Two Three into Mean Streets into Shaft into The American Friend. A city in crisis, four different views.
The Double Feature That Works Best: January 9, just Double Indemnity and The Killers back to back, if you can only stay for two. Stanwyck and Lancaster, two of the most physical presences noir produced, both waiting for deaths they've helped arrange.
The Memorial Tribute Worth the Afternoon: Diane Keaton, January 25. Stay for Reds in the afternoon and Annie Hall at 8pm. Two performances that changed what American actresses were understood to be.
The Working Class Night to Stay Up For: January 27. Kes at 12:15am, Bicycle Thieves at 2:15am, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner at 6:30am. Three films about the experience of class as a physical condition.
The Guest Programmer Pick: Michael Kalish, January 26. A sculptor's list. Days of Wine and Roses at 4am is the reason to stay through.
The Jean Arthur Night: January 15. The Talk of the Town and Only Angels Have Wings in sequence. Hawks directing her opposite Cary Grant, which is as good as the 1930s Hollywood movie gets.
The Discovery of the Month: The Offence (January 28, 12:30am). Connery, Lumet, a detective who becomes what he pursues. Made in 1973. Almost nobody has seen it.
The TCM Imports Pick: Woman in the Dunes (January 25, 4am). Teshigahara's surrealist masterpiece about a man trapped in a sand pit, and what that turns out to mean about ordinary human life. January at 4am is the correct time.
~
January has the weight that the new year earns when TCM treats it seriously. The MLK Day programming is the most comprehensive political statement the channel makes in a single day. The Keaton memorial arrives three weeks into the year while the loss is still fresh. The Working Class series reaches its most global and most serious week. The Flashback Fridays noir night argues for noir as a form rooted in retrospection in ways that reveal something true about the genre. And Jean Arthur as Star of the Month is TCM recovering one of the performers most routinely underestimated by the classical Hollywood system - a woman whose talent was so specifically human that the industry never quite knew what category to put her in, and who made better films with it than almost anyone who received more credit.
The month closes, strangely, with Jon Voight and two films about American mythology and its costs. Make of that what you will. February brings Bugs Bunny as Star of the Month, which is a tonal shift the channel appears to have planned deliberately. More on that in next month's preview.
