The Best Years of Our Lives: My Watchlist for the 2026 TCM Film Festival

It’s hard to believe that the 2026 TCM Film Festival – my 12th in-person and 14th overall – will kick off in just two weeks! It seems that I live my entire year waiting for this event; it always seems so far away, and then before I know it, it’s here and gone, and I’m living for the next one. Because of the blink-of-an-eye-ness of it all, I wasn’t impatiently waiting this year for TCM to serve up the final schedule – I was actually savoring the anticipation – and when the schedule did drop, I didn’t leap on it like I usually do, like a dog with a hunk of sirloin. I didn’t even look at it until the end of the day, after I’d finished all my daily to-do tasks and had a cocktail to accompany my review. (It was supposed to be an extra dirty martini, but I didn’t have any gin, so I settled for a tequila and Crystal Light. Whaddya gonna do?) My older daughter, Veronica, will be my partner in crime again this year. It actually wasn’t until a few days later that I started really examining the…