TCM Monthly Preview: June 2025
June doesn’t have a single dominant spine the way May did - there’s no nine-night survey course running through every Tuesday and Thursday. What it has instead is a month that feels genuinely curated in the looser sense, where the best nights often arrive without warning and the recurring threads are worth following even if none of them anchors the whole month the way the Western Spotlight did. The Art of the Con runs as the TCM Spotlight on Fridays, Gary Cooper is Star of the Month on Wednesdays, the BFI Film Archive gets two spotlight nights, and Ennio Morricone’s scores get a two-part tribute that I’m already buzzing about. Most importantly, June is Pride Month, and TCM marks it with two dedicated programming blocks that are among the most thoughtfully assembled nights on the whole schedule. There’s also a thread of Summer Romance daytime programming running through the Sundays that I’ll acknowledge but mostly leave alone - the evening and overnight programming is where the real action is.
Let's go.
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Sunday, June 1st opens with the Spike Lee double feature: Do the Right Thing (1989) at 8pm and Mo’ Better Blues (1990) at 10:15. I’m always glad when TCM programs Lee, and Do the Right Thing is one of the handful of American films that I think everyone living in this country should have to sit with at some point. It’s a film that refuses to let you off the hook and refuses to tell you who’s right, and it's been 36 years and it hasn’t aged a day in any direction that matters. Mo’ Better Blues is the more underrated entry, and Denzel Washington playing a jazz trumpeter too consumed by his own music to notice what’s happening around him is one of his performances that doesn’t get talked about enough. The TCM Imports give you Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) at 2:45am - one of the most purely pleasurable films in the Imports catalog, and a complete change of register from the Lee films, which is exactly the right move.
Monday, June 2nd is labeled “Bleak Cinema” by the American Cinematheque and that’s not an understatement. Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) at 8pm, Man of the West (1958) at 10:15, Cries and Whispers (1972) at midnight, and Rome, Open City (1945) at 2am. Make Way for Tomorrow is Leo McCarey directing a film about an elderly couple being slowly separated by their adult children’s practical indifference, and it is one of the saddest films I have ever watched. Orson Welles called it the only film that ever made him cry. It barely runs 90 minutes and it will level you. Cries and Whispers at midnight - Bergman, a dying woman, her sisters, a servant, and an interior of rooms so saturated with red that the whole film feels like it’s taking place inside a wound; it’s almost a cruel follow-up, and I mean that as a programming compliment. This is a night to be emotionally prepared for.
Tuesday, June 3rd is the Tony Curtis 100th birthday tribute. Some Like It Hot (1959) at 8pm, Sweet Smell of Success (1957) at 10:15. The pairing of these two is genuinely instructive about the range Curtis had that people underestimate because Some Like It Hot is so much fun that it tends to swallow every conversation about him. Sweet Smell is the corrective - Curtis as Sidney Falco, a press agent scraping and conniving in nocturnal Manhattan, is one of the more unsparing self-portraits an actor has ever commissioned. He wanted to be in the film partly to prove he was more than a pretty face, and it worked. The Defiant Ones (1958) runs at 12:15am and is a Kramer film that earns its earnestness more than most.
Wednesday, June 4th opens the Gary Cooper Wednesdays. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) at 8pm and The Pride of the Yankees (1942) at 10:15 lead the night. Deeds is Capra directing Cooper before either of them had calcified into their own myths - there’s a looseness and a genuine warmth to it that the later Capra films lose as they become more explicitly ideological. Cooper’s performance is so fundamentally decent that the film earns every ounce of sentiment it asks you for. The Pride of the Yankees is the Lou Gehrig biopic and if you don’t tear up at the “luckiest man” speech you may want to check your pulse. Sergeant York (1941) runs deep into the overnight and is worth noting as one of the better performances in his catalog - a real man, a real moral dilemma about pacifism and war, and Cooper treating the material with more complexity than the studio probably expected.
Thursday, June 5th opens the Ennio Morricone tribute with Cinema Paradiso (1988) at 8pm, the documentary Ennio (2021) at 10:15, and then Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) at 1am. This is a night about what film music actually does. Cinema Paradiso without Morricone’s score is a fine film; with it, it becomes almost unbearably nostalgic in a way that you know what is being done to you and you let it happen anyway. The Ennio documentary is a loving and comprehensive portrait of the man and his process, and if you watch it before going into The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the score lands differently. You hear it as composition rather than just accompaniment. Leone and Morricone made something together that neither one could have made separately, and this triple feature is TCM’s argument for that.
Friday, June 6th opens the Art of the Con Spotlight with two of the best films in the series: A Face in the Crowd (1957) at 8pm and Elmer Gantry (1960) at 10:15. The Kazan film is the more unsettling of the two and the one I keep returning to. Andy Griffith playing a drifter named Lonesome Rhodes who becomes a media figure who becomes a demagogue, and the film is so specific about how the machinery works - the gap between private contempt and public performance, the way an audience can be trained to love something that despises them - that it lands harder every decade that goes by. Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry won him the Oscar and deserved it, a performance of such explosive physical energy that you understand immediately why people follow this man even as you can see the con from the first scene. These two films in sequence are the Spotlight’s thesis statement.
Saturday, June 7th gives us the Paul Giamatti Two for One: Carnival of Souls (1962) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Neither film features Giamatti, but as a programming choice it’s inspired - two films about women trapped by forces that may be supernatural or may be the ordinary horror of other people, back to back. Carnival of Souls is the wilder card here, a low-budget Kansas film that achieves something genuinely dreamlike through sheer formal strangeness. It shouldn’t work and it absolutely works. Rosemary’s Baby doesn’t need introduction, but what I’ll say is that Mia Farrow’s performance is one that keeps revealing more the older I get. Noir Alley gives us The Undercover Man (1949), a tight procedural Glenn Ford picture. The overnight runs The Song Remains the Same (1976) and Monterey Pop (1968) back to back, which is an accidental music documentary double feature if you want to stay up until 6am, and I understand if you do.
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Sunday, June 8th has “Moon Shots” in prime time - Apollo 13 (1995) and For All Mankind (1989), the Al Reinert documentary made entirely from NASA footage. The documentary is the essential entry here. Apollo 13 is Ron Howard at his most technically accomplished, but For All Mankind is a piece of found poetry - footage from the actual moon missions assembled into something so beautiful that at points it stops being a documentary and becomes a meditation. The TCM Import that night is Tati’s Playtime (1967) at 2am, which is one of the most formally ambitious films ever made by anyone - Tati constructing an entire miniature Paris in a studio, then filming the comedy so wide and so deep that the audience has to actively search the frame for the joke. It’s a film about modernity eating human scale alive, and it took three years of Tati’s life and almost his entire fortune. Worth every frame.
Monday, June 9th spotlights director Peter Godfrey with a string of 1940s Warner Bros. melodramas, including The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) with Humphrey Bogart playing - against type - a charming man who may be poisoning his wife. It’s a curio worth investigating, and Alexis Smith is genuinely good in it.
Tuesday, June 10th is the first BFI Film Archive night: Piccadilly (1929), The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Gaslight (1940), Good-Time Girl (1948), and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). This is a remarkable lineup and I want to single out Colonel Blimp at 3:15am as the reason to stay up. Powell and Pressburger’s three-hour examination of an English soldier across fifty years of his life - from the Boer War through the Blitz - is one of the most emotionally intelligent films about men and war and friendship and the gap between idealism and reality that British cinema ever produced. Churchill tried to have it suppressed during the war because he felt it was too sympathetic to the Germans. He was wrong and the film is magnificent. Piccadilly at 8pm is also essential - a 1929 British silent with Anna May Wong in a role that is, for its era, extraordinary in what it allows her to do. This night has real range.
Wednesday, June 11th runs Gary Cooper in a romantic mode: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) at 8pm, Morocco (1930), Desire (1936), A Farewell to Arms (1932). The Cooper/Dietrich films from this era - Morocco especially - have a kind of charged stillness that I find irresistible. Sternberg shooting Dietrich in a way that makes the camera itself seem infatuated, and Cooper responding with a performance that is almost entirely understatement. They’re making different films and the gap between their approaches somehow produces chemistry.
Thursday, June 12th is Morricone Part 2, and this one hits harder than the first. The Mission (1986) at 8pm - Roland Joffé’s film about Jesuit missionaries in 18th century South America, with Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro, and a score that contains some of the most devastating music Morricone ever wrote. The oboe theme has followed me around since the first time I heard it. The Great Silence (1968) at 10:15 is back from May’s Western Spotlight, and I’ll say again what I said there: it ends the way it ends and you don’t get to negotiate with that. The Battle of Algiers (1966) at 2am closes the night, and it’s Pontecorvo and Morricone making a film about the Algerian independence movement that is so formally rigorous and so morally serious that it’s been screened at the Pentagon as a training film for counterinsurgency. Make of that what you will, but watch the movie.
Friday, June 13th is the Art of the Con’s best night: Paper Moon (1973) at 8pm, The Flim-Flam Man (1967) at 10pm, The Music Man (1962) at midnight, and Fellini’s Il Bidone (1955) at 4:30am. Paper Moon is Bogdanovich directing Tatum and Ryan O’Neal across Depression-era Kansas and it’s one of those films where every element clicks - the black and white photography, the father-daughter dynamic, the pace, the ending. Tatum O’Neal’s performance is one of the best child performances in American film. Il Bidone is the real gift here, a Fellini film that almost nobody knows - a small-time con man (Broderick Crawford) running religious scams on poor rural people, who discovers that guilt accumulates. It’s bleak and funny and humane in the way that only Fellini at his most unadorned can be. This is the Spotlight entry I’d single out as the discovery of the month.
Saturday, June 14th has the Brian Tyree Henry Two for One with Imitation of Life (1959) and The Learning Tree (1969). Imitation of Life is Douglas Sirk operating at his most devastating - a film about race and passing and maternal sacrifice that uses melodrama as a delivery system for truths that a realistic film couldn’t approach without being stopped. Juanita Moore’s performance as Annie is some of the finest acting in any Sirk film, which is saying something. The Learning Tree is Gordon Parks’ debut feature and the first Hollywood film directed by a Black American filmmaker - an autobiographical coming-of-age story set in 1920s Kansas that is about as precise a document of what it meant to be Black in that time and place as any film I know. Seeing them together is genuinely instructive.
Sunday, June 15th is Father’s Day, and TCM programs Father of the Bride (1950) and Life With Father (1947) in the prime-time slot. These are pleasant films and the right call for the occasion. But the Silent Sunday entry is the thing: The Kid (1921) at midnight and The Circus (1928) at 1am, two Chaplin features back to back. The Kid is Chaplin at his most unguarded - a film about a father and child that he made while losing custody of his own son, and the emotion in it is not performed. The Circus is lighter but technically remarkable, Chaplin doing physical comedy that still looks impossible. Spending Father’s Day in the late-night hours with Chaplin feels like the right choice.
Wednesday, June 18th runs more Gary Cooper - High Noon (1952) at 8pm, The Hanging Tree (1959), Friendly Persuasion (1956). I’ve written about High Noon before and my position on it hasn’t changed. Friendly Persuasion is the one I’d add to your Cooper shortlist if you haven’t seen it - a Quaker farmer facing the Civil War and the conflict between his pacifist convictions and his impulse to protect his family. Wyler directing Cooper in a film that’s both morally serious and genuinely warm, which is a harder combination to pull off than it looks.
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Thursday, June 19th is Juneteenth, and TCM programs a full day that spans Sparkle (1976), Say Amen, Somebody (1982), Soul Power (2008), ‘Round Midnight (1986), The Wiz (1978), Krush Groove (1985), Shaft (1971), and more. Say Amen, Somebody at 11:15am is the underrated entry - a documentary about gospel music and two of its founding figures, Thomas A. Dorsey and Willie Mae Ford Smith, and the performance footage in it is simply extraordinary. ‘Round Midnight at 4:30pm is Dexter Gordon as a jazz musician in Paris, a Tavernier film that is one of the most accurate portraits of the music and its culture that the movies have managed. And The Wiz at 8pm is a theatrical experience, maximalist and strange and full of performances that are doing too much in all the right ways. This is a day worth spending with the television.
Friday, June 20th is the Art of the Con’s peak night: The Sting (1973) at 8pm, How to Steal a Million (1966) at 10:15, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) at 12:30am, and Welles’ F for Fake (1973) at 4:30am. The first three are supremely enjoyable con films - The Sting and Thomas Crown in particular represent the high-water mark of the genre’s mainstream appeal. But F for Fake at 4:30 in the morning is where the Spotlight becomes genuinely interesting. Welles made it as an essay film about the art forger Elmyr de Hory and the biographer Clifton Irving who fabricated a Howard Hughes memoir, and then used both of them as launching pads for a meditation on fakery, authorship, and his own career as a maker of illusions. It is one of the strangest and most formally inventive films Welles ever made, which is saying quite a lot. The Spotlight could have ended on The Sting and called it a night. Ending on Welles interrogating the premise of the whole series is a much better choice.
Saturday, June 21st brings the Steve Buscemi Two for One with Scarecrow (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Again, neither film stars Buscemi, but both are classics of 1970s American cinema built around men on the margins of a system they can’t navigate, and they work as a double feature regardless of the framing. Scarecrow is the less-seen of the two - Gene Hackman and Al Pacino as drifters crossing the country, an underrated road picture with a genuinely unusual ending. Dog Day Afternoon is Lumet and Pacino and one of the most perfectly sustained single-day films ever made. Noir Alley gives us Pale Flower (1964) - Masahiro Shinoda directing a Japanese yakuza film that is mostly about ennui, two gamblers in a city that has stopped meaning anything to them. It’s one of the most quietly beautiful films in the whole Noir Alley rotation and it almost never gets talked about.
Sunday, June 22nd has the Sissy Spacek double feature in prime time: Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and Missing (1982). Both films were already covered in the April preview during Marty Stuart’s music programming, so I’ll just say that Missing is the entry here that I feel more strongly about - Costa-Gavras directing Spacek and Jack Lemmon in the real story of a man disappeared during Pinochet’s coup, and the film’s slow revelation of American complicity is as controlled and as infuriating a piece of political filmmaking as Hollywood has managed. The TCM Imports give you Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) at 2am, which is 75 minutes that will reorganize the way you think about cinema.
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Monday, June 23rd is the first of June’s two Pride nights: “Early Hollywood’s Pansy Craze.” Call Her Savage (1932) at 8pm, The Gay Divorcee (1934), Midnight (1939), Professional Sweetheart (1933), The Broadway Melody (1929). This is TCM doing the kind of curatorial work that it does better than almost any other outlet - surfacing the pre-Code era’s genuinely queer-coded performance culture, the pansy acts and the double entendres and the gender non-conformity that existed openly in early Hollywood before the Hays Code systematically erased it. The Gay Divorcee is the Astaire-Rogers musical, and its title alone is a document of an era when “gay” meant something specific in popular culture. The whole block is a reminder that queer visibility in Hollywood didn’t begin with the New Hollywood era; it was there at the start, and then it was taken away for decades.
Tuesday, June 24th is The Gilded Age: The Age of Innocence (1993), The House of Mirth (2000), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). These are three films about American wealth and the violence it does to people who don’t quite fit inside its requirements, and they get progressively more merciless in that order. Scorsese’s Wharton adaptation is lush and correct and perhaps too tasteful. Terence Davies’ House of Mirth is less well known and genuinely devastating - Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart, a woman destroyed by a society that made her dependent on it. The Magnificent Ambersons at 1am is Welles, and what RKO took away from Welles when they cut and burned the film is one of cinema’s great losses. What survives is still one of the greatest American films ever made, and the ending - what Welles intended and what got made in its place - remains an open wound in film history.
Wednesday, June 25th continues Cooper with Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) and Ball of Fire (1941) - both Lubitsch and Hawks giving Cooper the comic treatment, and both films are a pleasure. Ball of Fire in particular is Hawks at his most playful, Barbara Stanwyck’s chorus girl hiding from gangsters among a group of professors compiling an encyclopedia. It’s one of those films that’s so tightly constructed that you reach the end and realize no scene was wasted.
Thursday, June 26th is Evil Twins night: Dead Ringer (1964), The Black Room (1935), Sisters (1972). Dead Ringer is Bette Davis playing twins in late career, doing what only late Bette Davis could do with material that would have been trash in other hands. Sisters is the Brian De Palma entry - Margot Kidder, a Siamese twin separation, a murder, and De Palma’s split-screen formalism used to genuinely disorienting effect. It’s early De Palma and rougher than his best work but electric in ways his more polished films sometimes aren't.
Friday, June 27th closes the Art of the Con Spotlight: The Lady Eve (1941) at 8pm leads, and this is the series saving its single best film for last. Preston Sturges directing Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in a con-and-romance that is as perfectly constructed as a Swiss watch and funnier than almost anything from its era. Stanwyck running rings around Fonda while he remains gloriously, helplessly oblivious is one of the great pleasures of classical Hollywood comedy. The Producers (1967) at 10pm and I Love You Again (1940) overnight keep the theme going. If the Spotlight had no other entry than The Lady Eve, it would still justify its existence.
Saturday, June 28th brings the Nathan Lane Two for One - Double Indemnity (1944) and Chinatown (1974). This is either the best or the most on-the-nose pairing in the month, depending on your taste, and I think it’s actually both. Two films about Los Angeles and the way the city’s beauty conceals rot, separated by thirty years, each one doing something the other couldn’t. Noir Alley gives us Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) - Barbara Stanwyck again, a bedridden woman who overhears her own murder being planned on a crossed telephone line. One of the most claustrophobic films in the Noir Alley catalog and one of the best.
Sunday, June 29th closes the month’s Sundays quietly with the Stewart Granger double feature in prime time, but the real draw is the TCM Imports: Charulata (1964) at 3:30am, Satyajit Ray’s film about a lonely 19th-century Bengali woman developing an emotional attachment to her husband’s younger cousin. It’s one of the most precisely observed portraits of inner life in all of cinema - Ray watching Madhabi Mukherjee’s face the way Dreyer watched Falconetti’s - and it is criminally underseen. If you have never watched a Ray film, this is as good a place to start as any.
Monday, June 30th closes Pride Month with Night 2: Milk (2008), Go Fish (1994), Without You I’m Nothing (1990), Paris is Burning (1990), Fox and His Friends (1975). Paris is Burning at 1:30am is the essential entry, Jennie Livingston’s documentary about the Harlem ball culture of the 1980s, drag and vogueing and realness, the most influential document of queer underground culture that mainstream cinema has ever accidentally produced. Fox and His Friends is Fassbinder at 3am, and it’s a film that loves and hates its protagonist in equal measure - a gay man from the working class who comes into money and is destroyed by the milieu it buys him entry to. Fassbinder implicating himself in the critique. June ends at 3am with Fassbinder and that feels about right.
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June 2025: The Superlatives
The One You Can’t Miss: A Face in the Crowd (June 6, 8pm). Andy Griffith’s performance is one of the most prescient things the American cinema has ever accidentally produced.
The Discovery of the Month: Il Bidone (June 13, 4:30am). Fellini without the spectacle, and better for it.
The Night of the Month: June 13. Paper Moon, The Flim-Flam Man, The Music Man, and Fellini’s con-man masterpiece in a row.
The Hidden Treasure: Pale Flower (Noir Alley, June 21, 12am). A yakuza film about ennui. Sincerely one of the most beautiful films in the Noir Alley rotation.
The One to Stay Up For: F for Fake (June 20, 4:30am). Welles interrogating the entire premise of the Spotlight series. A perfect closer.
The Double Feature That Works Best: The Kid and The Circus on the Silent Sunday night of Father’s Day (June 15). Two Chaplin films in the middle of the night is its own kind of gift.
The Thread Worth Following: The Art of the Con Spotlight, start to finish. It begins with Kazan indicting the media-political complex and ends with Welles asking what truth even is. That’s a complete argument.
The Programming Choice That Made Me Happiest: Putting The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp at 3:15am on the BFI night (June 10). Three hours, in the dead of night, one of the greatest films Powell and Pressburger ever made. For whoever is still watching.
The Underrated Entry: Scarecrow (June 21, 8pm). Hackman and Pacino in 1973, a film that should be discussed alongside Midnight Cowboy and almost never is.
The Performance Worth Your Time: Gillian Anderson in The House of Mirth (June 24, 10:30pm). A film and a performance that deserve a much larger reputation than they have.
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June is a month of nights rather than a month with a thesis. There’s no single argument running through it the way the Western Spotlight organized May. What there is instead is a remarkable number of individual evenings that each do something distinct - the Bleak Cinema Monday, the BFI Archive nights, the Morricone tribute, the Pride programming, the Art of the Con Fridays capping with Welles. The month rewards the same thing all TCM months reward, which is paying close enough attention to find what’s buried in the schedule. June buries a lot of good things. Keep your eyes open.
