It’s time to look back on a year of Traitors and Sinners, of Bad Bunnies and Such Brave Girls, with the Guide’s now annual roundup of the year’s best culture. As ever, the Guardian is already knee-deep in lists – of films (UK and US), albums (across rock and pop, and classical), TV shows, books and games, and theatre, comedy and dance. Some of those have already counted down to No 1, others will reach their respective summits in the coming days, so keep an eye on the homepage.
Our list meanwhile is entirely, unapologetically partial, and definitely not as comprehensive as The Guardian’s many top 50s: there are numerous albums we never got around to hearing, and TV shows we’re still only halfway through. (Pluribus, Dope Thief and Blue Lights, I will return to you, I promise!) But hopefully it should give a flavour of a year that, despite so many headwinds, was a pretty strong one for culture. On with the show!
TV
When it wasn’t plotting to end the cinema-going experience, Netflix was churning out TV series at the usual rapid clip. Much of its programming vanished from our collective memory within days of hitting the homepage – did Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Colman Domingo and Will Forte really make a TV show in 2025, or was that just a fever dream you had after taking too much Night Nurse? Still, Netflix’s Adolescence felt indelible, a remarkably well-conceived and acted drama, not to mention a national conversation-starter. My Netflix series of the year though was The Eternaut (Netflix), an Argentinian end-of-the-world drama that depicted the apocalypse with startling clarity, all while contending with the country’s unstable political past. Do catch up on it over Christmas if you can; it’s only six episodes. Another international series that wowed me was Mussolini: Son of the Century (Sky Atlantic), Joe Wright’s darkly compelling account of Il Duce’s rise, which sought to “seduce” the audience into understanding Mussolini’s appeal, before making them feel awkwardly complicit when his grip tightened.
It was a strong year for TV comedy. With How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) (BBC iPlayer), Steve Coogan and his writers, the Gibbons brothers, managed to find yet another fertile avenue for Norfolk’s finest to furrow, as Alan got stuck into “men’s mental health” and much more besides. In its second series, Such Brave Girls (BBC iPlayer) solidified its status as the most daringly ugly comedy around, and I laughed like a jackal at much of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s industry satire The Studio (Apple TV+), which has also felt more and more relevant with every real-world Hollywood merger and worrying AI “innovation” that has arrived in its wake. Comeback show of the year, meanwhile, was surely South Park (Paramount+) which, in its 27th and 28th seasons, no less, went on a hilarious scorched-earth assault of the Trump administration. No one was spared, not least the president, recast as a micro-appendaged, Satan-impregnating, Saddam-a-like.
Alien: Earth (FX) featured its own unlikely breakout star – a sheep with a gruesome little octopoid creature embedded in its eye. Not everyone vibed with Noah Hawley’s offbeat take on the franchise, but it certainly creeped me out like no other series this year. Though there were moments that came close in Adam Curtis’ latest mammoth video essay Shifty (BBC iPlayer), a haunting and sometimes very funny account of the fracturing of our shared reality, from Thatcherism onwards. Finally, it’s hard to argue for anything other than The Celebrity Traitors (BBC iPlayer) being the biggest show of the year, in the UK at least. It could have gone so badly wrong – overly chummy or stage-managed – but it felt as addictive as any of the civilian series.
And here are five great TV episodes to check out: LOL Last One Laughing UK (Amazon Prime, s1, ep3); Louis Theroux: The Settlers (BBC iPlayer) standalone documentary); Pluribus – We Is Us (Apple TV+, s1, ep1); Severance – Cold Harbour (Apple TV+, s2, ep10); Slow Horses – Tall Tales (Apple TV+, s5, ep3)
Music
Two long-term Guide faves released much-anticipated new albums in 2025, and they were both as good as we’d hoped. Cotton Crown by the Tubs built on the brilliant, withering jangle of the four-piece’s debut with moments of tender reflection by vocalist Owen Williams about his late mother. And the wonderfully freewheeling Getting Killed, by ascendant New York band Geese was nothing less than a sensation, earning the band fans from Cillian Murphy to Patti Smith overnight. (Side note: ineligible for this list, as it was released right at the final knockings of 2024, is Geese frontman Cameron Winter’s solo record, the beguiling chamber-folky Heavy Metal – but it definitely feels spiritually 2025 and deserves a mention.)
Meanwhile, an album no one expected to ever see the light of day – Let God Sort Em Out by long-dormant rap duo Clipse – did magically arrive and was maybe even better than hoped, full of deliciously cutting lines and featuring some of Pharrell Williams’s best production in yonks. If that album felt like a welcome throwback, the glitchy, frenetic Stardust by Detroit’s finest, Danny Brown, sounded beamed in from some strange future, thanks to the rapper cannily collaborating with some of the most adventurous producers working in hyperpop. Yorkshire producer Blawan’s SickElixir was even more bracing, a collection of garage, bass and dubstep tracks that sounded as if they had been fed into a wood chipper and reassembled – but, in a good way, obviously.
There were tons of great albums for those of us who like things on the crunchier end of the spectrum. Deftones are probably as big as they’ve ever been, thanks to being discovered by gen Z in recent years, and their 10th LP, Private Music, was as pleasingly pummelling as anything in their back catalogue. I really enjoyed Last Leg of the Human Table, the new album by Indiana four-piece Cloakroom, which was described by most reviewers as shoegaze, but sounded more like Teenage Fanclub or Weezer backed by a doom-metal rhythm section. And Chrome Dipped, by Aussies Civic, pushed garage rock to its gnarliest, noisiest extremes. On It’s a Beautiful Place, Chicago duo Water From Your Eyes spiked their art-pop with 90s alt-rock and techno, a mixture that shouldn’t have worked but really, really did. And Wolf Alice, now probably Britain’s biggest guitar band without the numbers 1, 9, 7 and 5 in their name, also evolved on the 70s soft rock-tinged The Clearing – an album that felt stadium-sized.
And here are five great songs to listen to: Bad Bunny – Nuevayol (music video of the year, for sure!); Bar Italia – Fundraiser; Model/Actriz – Cinderella; Turnstile – Birds; Underscores – Music
Film
It feels like several years ago now, but January and February brought some great, late-arriving Oscar contenders to UK cinemas, in particular two films that contended with the complexities of the Jewish experience in wildly different ways: Brady Corbet’s hefty The Brutalist, about a Holocaust survivor’s difficult encounter with mid-century America; and Jesse Eisenberg’s funny, caustic A Real Pain, where he and Kieran Culkin played mismatched cousins embarking on a heritage tour around Poland. Rounding out the year (and the triumvirate) is Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet as a wayward ping-pong prodigy. A berserk joyride through mid-century Jewish New York, it doubles up as the best sports movie of the year and will be a major Oscars contender come March. Catch it when it hits cinemas on Boxing Day.
Britain’s film industry often feels like little more than a place where Hollywood studios can make their blockbusters on the cheap (for the time being at least). Despite this, some excellent British films snuck through this year. 28 Years Later was a zombie film like no other: a gory, kaleidoscopic Brexit parable replete with references to The Wicker Man, Teletubbies and Jimmy Savile. Pillion, about a blossoming BDSM dom-sub romance between Alexander Skarsgård’s biker adonis and Harry Melling’s wide-eyed homebody, managed to be warming without ever vanilla-ising the scene it was portraying. And I Swear, Kirk Jones’s triumphant biopic of Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, was the sort of adeptly put-together, mainstream British drama there are far too few of these days. Catch it on streaming over Christmas: you won’t regret it.
In the comedy stakes, Eva Victor marked herself out as a distinctive new voice with her sterling comedy drama Sorry, Baby, about the aftershocks of a sexual assault, while the relentlessly funny/cringe-inducing Friendship managed to capture the distinctive voice of I Think You Should Leave’s Tim Robinson in full feature-film form without the joke ever wearing thin (see also, Robinson’s great, goofy conspiracy series The Chair Company). Two films though were more audacious than anything else I saw this year: Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, a white-knuckle revenge thriller filmed entirely on the sly, behind the backs of the same oppressive state it was critiquing; and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a thrillingly of-the-moment American epic that will be discussed and debated long after it dominates next year’s awards season.
And here are five great performances to catch: Miles Caton (Sinners); Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon); Jesse Plemons (Bugonia); Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value); Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy)
Podcasts
The most talked-about podcast of the year is surely Wisecrack, which started by telling the story of standup Edd Hedges’ close encounter with his childhood bully turned murderer, before evolving into something knottier and more poignant. If it doesn’t get a Baby Reindeer-style TV adaptation in the next 12 months, I’ll be amazed. The other narrative podcast that truly wowed me in 2025 was Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, a history of the Afrobeat pioneer that combined great talking heads, meticulously researched archive material and, at its centre, a simply remarkable life story.
The series I turned to when I most needed a break from doom-laden current affairs podcasts was Elis James and John Robins, which remained remarkably consistent in its ability to whip up entertaining waffle. (John’s meltdown – threatening to sack everyone in the studio after learning that his credit score was worse than Elis’s – was probably my favourite podcast moment of the year.) Elsewhere, The Big Picture, a favourite of the Guide’s, outdid itself this year. Along with the usual insightful industry chat, movie drafts and rankings of filmographies, there was its year-long 25 for 25 season, which selected the 25 greatest films of the century so far. We’ll find out No 1 on New Year’s Eve. David Runciman’s history of ideas podcast Past Present Future was also strong in 2025, with seasons on the history of revolutionary ideas (from the Magna Carta to Darwinism) and Politics on Trial, which went from Socrates all the way to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And in Cannonball With Wesley Morris, one of the most engaging cultural commentators around served up his always-opinionated, always-surprising takes on the latest goings-on in pop culture (his episode on why music criticism has lost its bite is a must-listen).
Lastly, please do check out the Guardian’s great investigative pods from this year: Missing in the Amazon, which told the story of the 2022 disappearances of journalist Dom Phillips and defender of Indigenous rights Bruno Pereira while reporting from a remote corner of the rainforest; and The Birth Keepers, a year-long investigation into the highly controversial Free Birth Society. That’s not to forget Guardian regulars like daily news pod Today in Focus, weekly analysis pods Politics Weekly, Politics Weekly America and Science Weekly, foodie chat pod Comfort Eating With Grace Dent, and Football Weekly and Women’s Football Weekly, which have been joined in the sports podcast stable, for the next weeks, by Ashes Weekly.
Games
Early in the year I spent a full month exploring the ranging puzzle-palace of Blue Prince, an extraordinarily intelligent, sedately paced game in which you search for the 46th room of a shape-shifting mansion. Every day, you decide what’s behind the next door, selecting from a small range of blueprints (get it?) to create your own meandering path through the family pile; when you hit a dead end, you go to sleep and start again in the morning. And I’ve spent the last few months of the year bashing my head against Hollow Knight: Silksong, an exquisite yet harshly punishing game about a quasi-magical spider on a pilgrimage through a decaying religious capital. After three months I have only just reached the final boss; rarely has a game made me despair as much, and yet I kept going back to it. Between these two extremes – one a challenge for the intellect, the other a challenge for the reflexes – lies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a surreal and extravagantly French game about a small group of explorers trying to kill death. (This is a reductive explanation but look, if I tried to explain Clair Obscur in full, we’d be here all day.) It is a game for people who enjoy sumptuous belle epoque-inspired artistic direction and a decent story.
Those games are all fairly huge, but for the time-poor, Despelote is a micro-marvel: a quasi-autobiographical game about family and fandom, played from the point of view of an Ecuadorian child during the country’s 2002 World Cup qualifying campaign. And another autobiographical game is the comedic-looking but heartfelt Consume Me, a game about being a teenage girl immersed in diet culture in the 00s, managing school life and trying not to disappoint your parents. Lastly: you can’t go wrong with Mario Kart World. It has provided my whole family and every visitor to my household with uncomplicated fun since the summer. Keza MacDonald
Books
My book of the year is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. She spent 20 years on it, and it shows – her sentences are immaculate (I don’t think I’ve ever underlined a book so much). It’s a love story, but it’s also a book about migration, friendship, loss and family. It completely broke me – totally worth the nearly 700 pages. Desai narrowly missed out on a second Booker after another of my favourites, Flesh by David Szalay, took it home. His novel, following his protagonist István from teenage life on a housing estate in Hungary to elite circles in the UK, is bold, refreshingly spare and moreish despite its unrelenting bleakness.
Several of my favourite recent novels came out in paperback this year. I’ve been pushing My Friends by Hisham Matar – about three Libyan exiles living in London – into the hands of all my friends. Then there’s The Coin by Yasmin Zaher – a decidedly weird but brilliant tale of a Palestinian-American woman living in New York who gets involved in a Birkin bag reselling operation. And I loved Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner’s spy caper, following morally dubious agent Sadie Smith as she infiltrates an eco-commune in France. Finally, the book that took me by surprise this year was Strange Pictures by Uketsu, a clever mystery slowly resolved through several creepy drawings. Ella Creamer
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