TCM Classic Film Festival 2025
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Sprawl tends to dilute a franchise, but the critical fanfare greeting this week’s release of the second and final season of Andor suggests that Star Wars is as fit now as it’s been since audiences were first swept up into its alternate universe nearly fifty years ago. Reviewing Andor’s first season for the New Republic in 2022, David Klion called it “one of the smartest shows anyone has made in recent years.” Now that he’s seen “the entire twenty-four-episode run, I’ll go further,” writes Klion, “and say that Andor is quite simply an all-time series—one as informed by classic international cinema about war, espionage, and revolutionary politics as by George Lucas’s source material.”
Andor is a prequel to Rogue One (2016), directed by Gareth Edwards and written by Chris Weitz and Andor creator Tony Gilroy. Rogue One, in turn, is a prequel to Star Wars (1977), Lucas’s scrappy sci-fi adventure inspired by the serial films of the pre-television era. Even after it became a global sensation, the projected franchise might have fizzled if Lucas and his team—led by director Irvin Kershner and screenwriters Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan—hadn’t fleshed out the characters of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Hans Solo, and Darth Vader in the first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
Looking back at Empire in 1997—two years before the rollout of Lucas’s prequel trilogy and well before Disney released the sequel trilogy in the latter half of the 2010s—Roger Ebert wrote: “After the space opera cheerfulness of the original film, this one plunges into darkness and even despair, and surrenders more completely to the underlying mystery of the story. It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.”
On Thursday, Lucas will officially open this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival when he introduces a forty-fifth-anniversary screening of Empire. The festival’s sixteenth edition will run through Sunday, when Michael Mann closes it out with a thirtieth-anniversary presentation of Heat, starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and the late Val Kilmer.
The theme of TCMCFF 2025 is “Grand Illusions: Fantastic Worlds on Film,” and a screening of a 70 mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) will be followed by a conversation with Keir Dullea, who plays Dr. David Bowman, the lone survivor of the spacecraft Discovery One’s mission to Jupiter. Among the many, many other special guests: Rob Reiner and Kathy Bates, the director and star of Misery (1990); Kyle MacLachlan, the late David Lynch’s avatar in Blue Velvet (1986); Keith Carradine, who will talk about Phil Karlson’s newly restored Gunman’s Walk (1958); and Bill Hader, who will introduce Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (1941).
After Michelle Pfeiffer leaves her hand- and footprints at the TCL Chinese Theatre, she’ll attend a screening of Steve Kloves’s The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989). Cinematographer Lol Crawley—who shot Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist on VistaVision, a widescreen format in which a 35 mm negative is run horizontally through the camera gate—will be on hand for a VistaVision projection of John Sturges’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957).
This year’s Robert Osborne Award will be given to George Stevens Jr., who will present his father’s The Talk of the Town (1942), starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Ronald Colman, as well as the world premiere of a new restoration of his own documentary George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (1984). There will also be a tribute to director Michael Schultz (Car Wash, 1976) and a salute to the British Film Institute.
At IndieWire, Jim Hemphill talks with Robert A. Harris and James Mockoski, who have collaborated with Paramount, the George Eastman Museum, UCLA, and the Museum of Modern Art on a restoration of Beau Geste (1926), the first adaptation of P. C. Wren’s novel tracking the adventures of three English brothers who enlist in the French Foreign Legion. Directed by Herbert Brenon, the silent drama features a cast led by Ronald Colman, and the world premiere of the restoration will be accompanied live by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
Beau Geste was such an extravagant production—and such a popular and critical hit—that most preservationists assumed that someone somewhere was working to save it, “but no one was,” says Harris. “It takes building an army to make this work happen,” says Mockoski. “It’s not a profitable endeavor. It’s just good to do because these are great films.”
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