TCM Classic Film Festival 2026

The second of four films Fonda and Redford costarred in together, Barefoot in the Park is Neil Simon’s adaptation of his 1963 Broadway hit with Redford reprising his role as button-down attorney Paul Bratter, settling into a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village with his free-spirited wife, Corie. Mike Nichols directed that production, but Gene Saks took on the movie, replacing the first Corie, Elizabeth Ashley, with Fonda. “Simon has taken a plot as bland as a potato, sliced it into thin bits—and made it as hard to resist as potato chips,” wrote an unnamed critic at Time, adding in the parlance of the times that “Jane’s performance is the best of her career: a clever caricature of a sex kitten who can purr or scratch with equal intensity.”

Joan Crawford, too, could purr, scratch, and more, and one of the major hits of her career, Letty Lynton, directed by Clarence Brown in 1932, was pulled from circulation in 1936. Pamela Hutchinson has the full story in the Guardian, but the gist is that rights issues kept Letty Lynton, “the lethal tale of a Manhattan socialite, her fiancé, and her vindictive ex-lover,” from being legally screened for ninety years. Those issues have finally been cleared, and Crawford’s grandson and Warner Bros. library historian George Feltenstein will present the world premiere of a new restoration on Friday.

“The World Comes to Hollywood” is the theme of this year’s edition, and as Charles Tabesh, senior vice president of programming and content strategy at TCM, tells KPBS critic Beth Accomando, he and his team intend “to celebrate the immigrants who helped create Hollywood.” There are, for example, five films screening in the Architects of Noir program, all of them directed by immigrants from Europe: Boris Ingster’s Strangers on the Third Floor (1940), Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941), Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951).

Key events this year include Glenn Close planting prints of her hands and feet at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on Friday prior to a screening of Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and John Turturro’s presentation of the Robert Osborne Award to Film Forum repertory artistic director and Rialto Pictures founder Bruce Goldstein before Saturday’s screening of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). There will be a tribute to Barbara Hershey with screenings of Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Chris Menges’s A World Apart (1988) and another tribute to composer Paul Williams, who wrote “Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog to sing in James Frawley’s The Muppet Movie (1979) and a slew of intentional misfires for the deluded singing duo played by Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty in Elaine May’s Ishtar (1987).

Along with these honorees, special guests will be on hand to say a few words about each of the films. Charles Burnett will present the new restoration of his second feature, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), and Faye Dunaway will help celebrate the world premiere of the fiftieth-anniversary restoration of Sidney Lumet’s Network. Further promising pairings include Joe Dante with Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Dana Delany with Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), Edgar Wright with Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), and Brooke Adams with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978).

“An air of uncertainty hangs over the fate of both the TCM Channel and the festival as a whole, puzzle pieces in the impending merger between Paramount and Warner Bros.,” writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times, “so this year in particular it feels vital to appreciate this truly special event, which has been pivotal in expanding our definitions of what a classic film is. Enjoy it while you can.”