In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.

CHRISTMAS WITH MEL BROOKS (December 25, 8pm)-- Figuring out what to show during the holiday season has got to be difficult. This year, TCM has come up with a brilliant way to celebrate Christmas--with Mel Brooks! Starting at 8pm on Christmas Day, there will be five of his pictures in a row, followed by his hilarious Dick Cavett interview. I love all of them, including his remake of Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (actually, that one is directed by Alan Johnson, who choreographed, among other things, the original "Springtime for Hitler" number), High Anxiety, his hilarious and extremely respectful satire of Hitchcock's films (my favorite moment is the elegant tracking shot that goes through a picture window), The Twelve Chairs, his second picture, relatively underappreciated; and the wonderful Silent Movie.

DIRECTED BY INGMAR BERGMAN (December 3, 8pm)--On December 3, there is a whole evening of programming devoted to one of the cinema's greatest artists, Ingmar Bergman. For me and my friends who loved film in the '50s and '60s, and for many, many others in this country and around the world, Bergman was the gateway to a new idea of moviemaking. The cliché, of course, is that Bergman made the first truly adult films that addressed serious issues of metaphysical import. This is, and always was, untrue: many people before Bergman had made films that took grand and troubled perspectives on questions of existence and belief, as did many others who followed him. Just as much of a cliché was the idea that Bergman's films were "serious" while, say, Alfred Hitchcock's films were "merely entertaining." I've always found these distinctions pretty useless. Great movies come in all shapes and sizes and they do many things at once. In the case of Bergman--along with Antonioni, Godard, Tarkovsky and Miklos Jancso, to name a few--his pictures are challenging and engrossing, and entertaining precisely because they're challenging and engrossing. And, of course, each one of those filmmakers is extremely different from the others, and each one of them changed and evolved over the years. The Bergman of the '50s--represented here by Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal (that was our introduction to Bergman here, the others were released later)--is a world away from the stunning trilogy of work he did in the early' 60s. It was quite a bracing experience to see Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence on their first runs. Those films articulated a particular kind of anxiety and spiritual suffering that we hadn't encountered in movies, rendered with a frankness and an intensity, a sharpness and urgency, that were moving in and of themselves. In other words, Bergman's point of view was moving. And then, a few years later, he remade himself from the inside out with Persona, and he kept doing it right up to the end with Saraband. On December 18, TCM will also show the film that he originally intended to be his last, Fanny and Alexander. A bountiful Shakespearean family epic, big and intimate, funny, harrowing...a spiritual struggle that seems ancient in its origins...a poetic journey through a inner life of a boy becoming a man--this is a remarkable artistic testament from a great artist. And it's also, among many other things, a beautiful Christmas film.

by Martin Scorsese