The 2025 TCM Traditional Movie Competition is opening with a flex of galactic muscle: “The Empire Strikes Again,” celebrating its forty fifth anniversary, will kick off the sixteenth version of the pageant offered by Turner Traditional Films in Los Angeles on Thursday, April 24. And even higher, The Maker himself, George Lucas, can be in attendance to introduce it.
It’ll be a gap turbolaser salvo for an entire weekend of movies revolving across the theme “Grand Illusions: Improbable Worlds on Movie,” brilliantly overseen as soon as once more by longtime pageant director, Genevieve McGillicuddy. Different movies in that otherworldly lineup embrace “Spirited Away,” “The Unbelievable Shrinking Man,” “Mothra,” and “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.”
The pageant will run your complete weekend, centered as at all times on the Hollywood Roosevelt Lodge, which provides particular charges for pageant attendees, with screenings on the neighboring TCL Chinese language Theatre IMAX, the TCL Chinese language 6, the Egyptian, and the El Capitan.
Michelle Pfeifer may have a hand-and-footprint ceremony on the TCL Chinese language Theatre, and filmmaker and AFI founder George Stevens Jr. will obtain the Robert Osborne Award, given to figures who’ve performed a particular position in maintaining movie historical past and heritage alive. The award is known as after the unique and longtime TCM host who died in 2017.
Lately, the TCM Movie Competition has had extraordinary occasions akin to final yr’s opening night time “Pulp Fiction” screening, and a restoration screening of “Rio Bravo” with Angie Dickinson in attendance. (“Rio Bravo” occurs to share a co-writer with “The Empire Strikes Again” within the nice Leigh Brackett.) The pageant is low-key one in every of Hollywood’s hottest tickets, with even A-list administrators of the very best magnitude angling to introduce movies they love: Steven Spielberg was proud to introduce a restoration of George Stevens’ “Large,” along with participating in a dialog with TCM host Ben Mankiewicz about his personal work.
Lucas is especially suited to the pageant, and it will likely be an actual deal with to see him introduce the “Star Wars” sequel given his personal extraordinary movie historical past data and acknowledgment that “Star Wars” was impressed by many movies of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.
“’The Empire Strikes Again’ is like ‘The Godfather Half II,’” Mankiewicz, TCM Primetime Anchor and Official Host of the TCM Traditional Movie Competition, mentioned in a press release. “Sure, technically, they’re sequels, the second film in a sequence. However they’re a lot extra. ‘Empire’ not solely dazzled and delighted ‘Star Wars’ followers, it pushed the boundaries of moviemaking, additional deepening its characters and increasing the preferred cinematic universe of all time. The primary ‘Star Wars’ image in 1977 ignited a brand new period in Hollywood and turned a era of younger folks into passionate film followers for all times. Then, someway, three years later, alongside comes ‘Empire,‘ which could even be higher. It’s a surprising accomplishment and certainly stands one of many nice achievements within the historical past of movie.”
IndieWire definitely agrees. Placing “The Empire Strikes Again” on our listing of the Biggest Films of the Nineteen Eighties, we wrote, “The emotional reality of this story of mentorship and its limits, of friendship and its compromises, and of 1 very deranged father’s quest to be reunited along with his son (a father who thinks he can sever his son’s hand however nonetheless win his companionship and loyalty), cuts via any plot holes with a dedication to its themes so timeless that even Homer and Virgil may perceive it.”