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

WILLIAM POWELL (Thursdays in December) - From the early '30s through the late '40s, William Powell was one of the biggest stars in movies. He was also a great artist, one of the people who brought movies into the sound era. The great critic Manny Farber called Powell a "conductor," who "would first use his satchel underchin to pull the dialogue into the image, then punctuate with his nose the stops for each chin movement, composing the film into linear movement as it went along." Although he leaves out Powell's unforgettably clipped and elegant voice, Farber's description of his physical "instrument" is uncanny. Powell seemed incapable of making an ordinary move, and his chin and nose really did become visual motifs in his pictures. But I think Farber is also on target with his suggestion that Powell was one of the people who "composed" his films, in the sense we customarily reserve for descriptions of directing. Like Tracy, Cagney, Grant, and Lombard, Powell was on the front lines at the dawn of sound, grinding out movies at a punishing pace, giving the art form a graceful urbanity, as well as a real unity and excitement: those actors invented a new rhythm for talking pictures as they went along. There are 39 pictures in this tribute (including Powell's 1922 debut in the John Barrymore version of Sherlock Holmes), and I'd recommend all of them, particularly two films with Kay Francis, Jewel Robbery and One-Way Passage. My Man Godfrey is essential, one of the greatest American movie comedies, where Powell had his ex-wife Carole Lombard as his screen partner, as well as a great writer (Morrie Ryskind) and director (Gregory La Cava). And you can see all six of the Thin Man pictures that Powell made with his most frequent acting partner, Myrna Loy (there are many other pairings with Loy in the tribute). That series represents a high point in comic invention and craft. Come to think of it, so does the entire career of William Powell.

BICENTENNIAL OF THE BIRTH OF CHARLES DICKENS (Mondays in December) - Why have Dickens adaptations made for so much good cinema? Sergei Eisenstein cited Dickens' storytelling techniques, translated by D.W. Griffith into parallel montage. But there is also a vivid sense of people and place in Dickens, both in great abundance, and of interior journeys--emotional, spiritual--brought to physical life. Once you encounter them on the page, you never forget Dan Pegotty's house by the sea or the churchyard where Pip meets Magwitch: they are all perfect spatial realizations of emotional states and conflicts. It's all so familiar to us that we forget how rare a gift Dickens possessed. TCM has programmed 13 Dickens pictures for December, including the epic adaptation of Little Dorrit made in the late '80s. I love the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sim, and of course David Lean's Great Expectations and Oliver Twist are remarkable-- they seem even fresher now than they did in the '40s. So do David O. Selznick's versions of David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities (in which Val Lewton, Selznick's assistant at the time, and Jacques Tourneur played an important role). Copperfield in particular, directed by George Cukor, is so lovingly and vividly acted (Dickens would have jumped for joy at the casting) and visualized and orchestrated that it feels more vibrantly alive with each passing year.