Culture 2025: the best in film, TV and music

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, a culture roundtable reviewing the very best of 2025.

0:23I don't know if you're an obsessive list maker who ranks all the things they watch, hear, consume, feel in the cultural ether or whether you can't even remember what the last thing you saw was. Either way, you might appreciate The Guardian's Guide to the very best music, film and TV put out in 2025. The critics have come together. Spreadsheets have been compiled. Democracy has prevailed. Here were their favourite lines from reviews. Our music editor, Ben Beaumont-Thomas. The rest of the album steadfastly fails to make the listener vibrate at a different level. It's all about as psychedelic as a baked potato.

1:06On film, Guardian film editor Catherine Short. He sounds like Hannibal Lecter, having smoked a hundredweight of weed, doing the rise of impression of an unctuous French head waiter he intends to eat. And TV critic and culture writer Hannah J Davies. If you thought that the toxic frenemy vibe between the White Lotus's blonde BFFs was lacking, say, 500 % more shrieking, multiple HR complaints, comedy-flavoured barbs, and a drug-fueled night out in Vegas, this is the show for you.

1:40What are they quoting? Answers to come at the end. In the meantime, here's something to argue about, something to agree on, or maybe just something to binge through the festive season.

1:57From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, it's a gift, serving you the best culture of 2025.

2:11Before we get to the joy and redemption, let's start in the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge. Ben, what was the single worst musical release or event of 2025? Well, actually, it turned out that many people thought it was Taylor Swift, but I think there's actually one that was even worse. It's the British band Sleep Token.

2:35Who are kind of the biggest British metal band in a generation. They kind of have amazing image. They sort of look like they stepped out of a kind of folk horror movie with all these amazing masks. And the lead singer is called Vessel. And the other guys in the band are called Two, Three and Four. And no one knows their names. But yeah, I mean, I don't think I've ever felt time move as slowly. It's some of the most profoundly turgid music ever made. With some of the worst lyrics ever. I've got eyelids heavy enough to break diamonds. That's a good one. Which is how you felt. Are you the guardian angel hacking into my brain cells, he asks.

3:12And the vessel says things like, I am the demon of Sodom. But actually the band kind of sounds like Maroon 5 if they all had like an iron deficiency. Yeah, it's fascinatingly terrible music. So bad, it's not even remotely good. Catherine, let's follow that with the most overcooked cinematic turkey of 2025. I mean, I think it's Jay Kelly, which is the George Clooney starring film about an amazingly gorgeous, fantastic film star played by George Clooney. He's just like George Clooney. It's like a movie where I'm playing myself. And it's directed by Noah Bamback, who I thought could do no wrong. Turns out he can do wrong.

3:55Jay Kelly, so handsome. Look at you, you're the American dream. The last of the old movie stars. I'm down here. You're up there, you're down here. It's so excruciating. You sort of wither within whilst watching it. He has this amazing club star, has these sort of picturesque encounters with people on a train with real people, played by people like Jamie Dimitri. And the idea that this is what they think real people are like in all their hilarious, quirky, starstruck... Quirky, normal people. Yeah, it's just so embarrassing. Just made me shake with horror. I mean and it's actually you know people are retching in cinemas at this time it's like the exorcist where they're like carried out on stretches terrible okay well Hannah what's the thing in 2025 that you wish you could permanently scrub from your eyeballs slash memory it brings me no joy to say this because I feel like we've all kind of been on this journey not to go to X Factor but we've all been on this journey with Lena Dunham since Girls.

4:55And we've, you know, so enjoyed her work. And I just think too much. It was, it was, it was truly too much. Too little. And too little. All at the same time. Hi, how are you? Girl, are you good? You're unhappy. She decided to answer a question that nobody'd really been asking, which is what if Bridget Jones were Indie Sleaze? And it was like so awful. It kind of came with all this prestige produced by working title. She's really trying to have her Richard Curtis moment. I could go and find my English dream. You know, a state ground, starting a garden. Ah! Good luck with that, love. It's this tale of an American who moves to London.

5:33Lucy based on her tale of being an American who moves to London, who gets into a relationship with a cool rock guy who says stuff like, you're just so alive, babe, you're so alive. And it just was, it was mad cringe. I came here to find myself. A lot of stuff went down in New York. My ex-boyfriend is living with... Wasn't it co-written by her lover, husband? Co-written by her indie guy, and her indie guy was played by Will Sharp. So it had a really good cast. It had Meg Salter as well in the lead role, but this was just not very good and has been canned by Netflix, which doesn't always mean a lot because Netflix will can a lot of things, but I think in this case, it was clear that it was quite a flop.

6:10Okay, so terrible metal, don't fall in love with George Clooney, or trust your partner to co-write your big TV project. Okay. To learning. Yeah, some learning.

6:29Well, this is a Today in Focus first. It's the inaugural cultural advent calendar. You all look so excited. Starting with you, Ben, what's behind the door for the third best album of the year? So, at number three in our countdown is...

6:49Blood Orange's Essex Honey. This is the latest album by Dev Hines, who has had this really amazing odd career in British pop music history of the last 20 odd years. He was in this band called Test Icicles. I was going to say, who would have thought the guy with the hat from Test Icicles would be the greatest artist one of his generation? That's right. Well, hey, they had some bangers. Circle Square Triangle. Circle Square Triangle. I mean, yeah. Great band if you wore head to toe American Apparel in 2009. Loved them. and then sort of made lo-fi, grainy R &B music as Blood Orange. And that was 15 years ago that he started that project.

7:25He's kind of released his masterpiece album under that project this year. And it's just such a stunningly beautiful album. It's British, but it's in New York. He moved back to the border of Essex and London where he grew up at a time when his mother was dying. And then the album was made in the wake of that.

7:49And it is just so suffused with the kind of way your brain works as you're grieving. That's enacted in such an amazingly beautiful way by using a lot of guest vocalists. And at one point, Lorde just pops up and just sings one line of an Elliot Smith song. Just so true to how memory kind of arrives in your head in the most unexpected way. Yeah, just incredibly powerful, beautiful music. Does Lorde charge by the line? That's it. Yeah, yeah. Once you fire out from New Zealand. Budget's gone. Yeah, exactly.

8:28Catherine, can you talk me through number three on The Guardian's best films of the year list?

8:39So number three is Young Mothers, which is the latest film from the Dardenne brothers, the Belgian social realists.

8:50Oh, yeah, so this is the one about the teenage mums in Belgium who are being taught how to take care of their babies. Absolutely brilliant. People who've come back with another banger, which was at Cannes, and it's absolutely superb and extremely moving.

9:08Hannah, unlike the other desks, The Guardian's TV desk has a very closely guarded top ten list. It's not actually revealed yet. It will be completely in its full form next week. However, I would like to ask you your top three. Hannah, what was your third favourite show of 2025? My third favourite show of the year was Such Brave Girls, which is this absolutely gross and rancid, but also very heartwarming in a weird way, comedy. Where is she? You're not even a student. Embarrassing. It's all right, everyone. I'm her mother. It is written by an amazing writer, actor called Kat Sadler, who also stars in it, alongside her real life sister.

9:51The real life sisters? Yes, her real life sister. You know, they're in their 20s, they're kind of struggling mentally. I'm different now, stronger, braver. I'm not going to let everyone push me around. What are you going to do? I'm going to run away. They're in this very toxic family situation with a very highly strung mother and her partner, who's like the stingiest guy on earth. And Kat Sutherland's character is also inexplicably engaged to her boyfriend, even though she's like definitely gay and completely repulsed by him. And it doesn't sound very funny. It probably doesn't sound very warm, but it kind of comes together unexpectedly.

10:33I'm just going to put the brakes on for a moment to discuss the honourable mentions that didn't make it to the top three. The hidden gems, let's say. Ben, can I start with you? Because if you are asking listeners to move outside their comfort zones, what would you recommend as a must-listen from an artist at the top of their game, but not necessarily built for mainstream consumption? It's the debut album by this duo, Los Thutanaca, who are an American duo, though, and they're siblings, but they have Aymaran heritage, which is indigenous people who live in modern-day Peru and Bolivia. so this duo kind of draw from that heritage and you have these kind of latin american rhythms and then over the top is guitar that i honestly don't think i've ever really heard played in exactly this way before you know everyone sort of assumes that the electric guitar is nothing new to be done with it and then every five years or something someone will come along and completely reinvent it and that's what's happened with this record it's just a completely nuts record wow katherine who made a brilliant film this year that too few people have seen so josh safty did um with the film marty supreme let me ask you something do you make money of this little table tennis thing not yet do you have a job no and actually lots of people will see it it's just out here on Boxing Day.

12:05He's split from his brother, right? He's split from his brother. So the brother made The Smashing Machine. He's made a different sports film, a good one, about a ping pong player called Marty Reisner. It's a sort of loosely fictionalised version of that in the 50s in New York. It's only a matter of time before I'm staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box. You think it's that simple? Yeah, I do. So, Timothy Chalamet plays Marty and he's trying to get the money to go to these tournaments because he's a really talented player and he wants to also bring out this range of his own customised ping pong balls.

12:37It's just fantastic. It's so funny. It's so great. It's so chaotic. So if there was justice in this world, it would be number one, I think. But there isn't because not enough people had seen it when we were voting. And there's just not enough justice in this world. Exactly. I think there's a song about that. Is Chalamet just completely unstoppable at this point? What were we, year four of TC? I quite like his sort of completely guileless, puppyish vibe. Like on this press tour, he's just like, yeah, my acting in this is totally amazing, basically. And I find that kind of endearing. Didn't he actually say in one of his victory speeches that, yes, I'm going to win an Oscar and that's what I'm aiming for?

13:15He manifests live in public, I think. Yeah, that was the SAG speech earlier this year. So he lost out on everything when he played Bob Dylan. He lost out on everything apart from one award to Adrian Brodie, who was in The Brutalist and his SAG speeches the only one he won he'd just finished shooting Marty Supreme I mean Marty Supreme has a dream that other people don't respect and so he was super channeling that vibe I think Timmy also he works really hard though like there was quite a jokes tweet earlier in the year that was like there must have been a point in the last few years where he was learning the harmonica doing research into chocolate and also learning to play ping pong all at once so he puts the time in too you know yeah I mean I can eat chocolate and play punk one if somebody's going to pay you enough money.

13:59Yeah, it'll do a lot more. Ping pong and eating chocolate. Come on, Catherine, you're so ungenerous. Hannah, a different question from these guys for reasons as stated earlier. Which show was completely inescapable this year? And justified. I think it's got to be celebrity traitors. I want to be a traitor. Oh, God, I don't know. You will have to stab people in the back. they'd do it to me they're showbiz people I'd do it to them which really bucked the trend for celebrity reality shows like really no offence to I'm a Celeb which just finished but you know they've got a really really high calibre and celeb traitors that I think I'm a Celeb just didn't kind of manage and a lot of these shows don't manage because why would they?

14:46I'm here to win I don't know what beasts lie within me I'm gonna fight till the death oh my god Players, welcome to the Highlands. You know, we're so used to reality TV and most of it's bad, but they managed to book some incredible people. I don't know how they talked, you know, Stephen Fry and Celia Imri and all those sorts of people into it. It was a different calibre of reality show, and I think that really shows in the ratings. Like, these were, remember when there used to be three channels ratings? Like, the consolidated ratings for the finale of Celebrity Traders were 15 million. I mean, this is completely unheard of stuff.

15:18This is truly water cooler. EastEnders Christmas Day era. Yeah, this is truly water cooler TV. I'm not amazing at maths, but I'm pretty sure that means that 20 % of the whole country watched the thing, which is absolutely wild. But I think it's just it's a very simple game. They didn't lean into the sort of classic reality tropes as well of everybody having a, dare I say it, a bit of a sob story. The personal stuff was kept to a minimum. And I think everyone just really almost likes sort of playing games at Christmas with the family, if that's what you do. But it was just very, very fun to watch.

15:46We've gone big on the celebs, but can we just have a moment for the Claudia Winkleman Appreciation Society, which is member one. me. I'm here for Claudia, The Fringe, everything. I'm here for it.

16:03Number two on the lists, because it feels like we're at Christmas Eve already. I should stop shouting. Ben, could you reveal, according to the Music Desk, what is the second best album of 2025?

16:18It is CMAT's Eurocountry. sexy picture of me, C-Map.

16:31And if you aren't familiar with C-Map, I feel like a lot more people did become familiar with C-Map this year. She was kind of a massive in Ireland, bit more of a cult thing over here until this record.

16:44Which kind of broke her through and I was listening back to it this morning and was thinking, who does it evoke to me? And I was thinking, it's half Stevie Nicks, half Victoria Wood is how hard to characterize it. It's the sort of acoustic guitar led, but then sort of sumptuously arranged big kind of pop rock arrangements. And then into that comes Seamat, who is just this ball of charisma, extremely funny, extremely self-lacerating, has a brilliant social realist side to her songwriting as well. I mean, the first song on the album has a line about you know i was 12 when the dad started killing themselves all around me i mean you don't hear that in pop music it's like maybe sam fender you do and this is a song that's about the collapse of the financial boom in ireland post 2008 and yet she makes it into this big sumptuous pop song and then there's songs about body image but she made it into a huge song that had a huge kind of tiktok dance craze she brings such levity to this material and yeah she's She's just been embraced so strongly by the UK.

17:55Catherine, I feel like I should do a drumroll for second prize on The Guardian's best films of the year. It's 2 ,000 metres to Andryfka, which is Turnoff's follow-up to 20 Days in Mariupol. So it's another Ukraine war documentary, and this one is almost more devastating, actually. And it's shot primarily from body cam footage that Ukrainian soldiers are wearing of being on the front line. And it's not a film you'll see twice. It's incredibly memorable and moving and upsetting and illuminating, but it's an absolutely astonishing piece of work. Wow. Hannah, what was your second favourite television show of the year?

18:43Well, aren't you a big brain girl? That would have to be Hacks. I mean, they've won a ton of Emmys, but it's still kind of flying under the radar. Tell us more. Maybe. So Hacks is this really wonderful half-hour comedy drama, and it's all about this ageing, slightly fading comedian called Deborah Vance, who's played amazingly by Jean Smart, and she kind of has to work with this younger writer, Ava, Hannah Einbinder, and, spoiler alert, they don't really get on. She's been doing this for 50 years. You're not going to beat her at her own game. Nobody beats Debra. So we're now four seasons deep. I think it's a very interesting portrayal of sort of mentorship and how it can be incredible and it can be so heartwarming and it can also be the most toxic thing that's ever happened to you.

19:34But weirdly, there is this thing in TV where there is a lot of this sort of self-referential comedy happening at the moment around the kind of inner workings of showbiz So not only Hacks, but also the studio with Seth Rogen, which was really great. So there are all these kind of shows about what it's like to be an actor, comedian, an influencer in this world.

19:55Coming up, the number ones revealed.

20:09The Free Birth Society made millions selling a simple message to pregnant women. You don't need ultrasounds, doctors or midwives. You can free birth. But behind the scenes, terrible things were happening. I feel ashamed about this, but I didn't think that the deaths were bad until a year after I left. Subscribe to The Guardian Investigates feed to get all the episodes of The Birth Keepers. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Out now.

20:42Okay, so this is the moment we're tentatively all waiting for, the number ones. Ben, could you reveal, this is your Top of the Pops Christmas Day moment, Could you reveal the number one album of the year? It is Lux by Rosalia, the Catalan pop singer.