The Guide #220: The best things we watched, read, and listened to this year – that weren’t from 2025
We’re only just tipping into December, which naturally brings the Christmas wishlist season. Already, five days in, plenty of outlets have shared their cultural best-ofs for 2025. You can read The Guardian’s top books (https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/best-books-of-2025) and top songs (https://www.theguardian.com/music/ng-interactive/2025/dec/03/the-20-best-songs-of-2025) of the year now, with our own TV, film, and music countdowns arriving soon.
Meanwhile, social feeds have likely been flooded with screenshots of colleagues’, friends’, or rivals’ Spotify Wrapped results. Liz Pelly argues persuasively about why sharing yours might not be the best idea (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/dec/03/spotify-wrapped-ai-create-your-own-playlists). This year’s Wrapped even includes a “listening age” feature that estimates how out-of-date your tastes are based on release dates, which can make some users realize they’re effectively centenarians in music terms (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/spotify-wrapped-music-listening-age-b2878058.html).
Of course, there’s no shame in stepping back from the flood of new releases to revisit forgotten favorites or enduring classics. So in this week’s Guide, we highlight some of the best non-2025 culture we engaged with in 2025—whether it was watched, read, listened to, or played.
Film
The growing appreciation for older films on Letterboxd and the rise of specialty cinemas have helped revive interest on both sides of the Atlantic. I enjoyed revisiting Jean-Pierre Melville’s noir Le Samouraï on the big screen, with Alain Delon prowling through Paris in a trench coat (streaming currently on Prime Video, surprisingly). I was also captivated by Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, which I watched for the first time (it’s rentable on most services). Its Oscar-fueled momentum this year, along with Anora’s success, has kept it in the conversation—one of four Palme d’Or winners to later win Best Picture (the others being Parasite and 1955’s Marty, which remains on my to-watch list).
Richard Linklater had a strong year, with two new films in the US—Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague. I revisited his breakout Slacker, a trip through early-90s Austin that follows a string of quirky, often unemployed characters. It’s a film I cherished in my early 20s, and I worried it might feel aged, but it remains utterly entrancing: a world you want to step into and live in.
Television
Adolescence dominated the TV landscape this year, but I found an older British drama that echoes its themes: Jake’s Progress (Channel 4), Alan Bleasdale’s 1995 work about a dysfunctional middle-class Liverpool family grappling with a pyromaniac child. It feels very of its era—the performances and score are grand—yet it stays sharply perceptive and lived-in, avoiding clichés.
There’s also a non-2025 documentary on iPlayer worth a look, even if it’s a bit of a cheat: S4C’s Ffa Coffi Pawb! released just eight days before 2025 began. It offers an entertaining, exhaustive look at the DIY Welsh-language music scene of the 1980s and the early career of Gruff Rhys (later of Super Furry Animals). The archival footage is fantastic—sweaty gigs in back rooms of North Wales pubs, and a pre-pubescent Rhys bragging to a Welsh chat show host about a punk fanzine he’d just made. Brilliant.
Music
A surprisingly fruitful detour into the state of the indie world came from Darius Van Arman, founder of Jagjaguwar, writing about the industry’s struggles for Stereogum. That piece led me to a release from the label’s early days: Drunk’s A Derby Spiritual (1996), a backwoods indie-folk record that sits somewhere between Bonnie Prince Billy and Neutral Milk Hotel. Van Arman notes it has accrued a mere $100 in Spotify streams over 15 years—a stark, sobering statistic. Give it a listen.
On the newer side, Witch’s latest album drew me back to their 1970s peak. Their self-titled 1975 record, the final one before they split and became a disco act, is full of sun-kissed, psych-tinged tunes. It’s the kind of music that sticks in your head all summer. And, of course, one of the year’s best needle drops happens in One Battle After Another, where Steely Dan’s Dirty Work scores a scene of a very high, very distracted Leo at a parent-teacher meeting. All told, the late-1960s listening mood is alive and well.
Books
This year I finally read Self-Help by American author Lorrie Moore, the 1985 collection that cemented her cult status. Sharp, witty, and slyly abrasive, Moore skewers the self-help genre through second-person imperative storytelling, with titles like How to Be an Other Woman, How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes), and The Kid’s Guide to Divorce. The stories are witty and inventive in form, while probing themes of womanhood, relationships, illness, family, and loss. Moore sustains a balance of snark and depth throughout. Ella Creamer.
Ella also curates Guardian’s Bookmarks newsletter. You can sign up here (https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/sep/20/sign-up-for-the-bookmarks-newsletter-our-free-books-email).
Games
A forthcoming book about Nintendo will soon be published, but this year has been rich for retro gaming exploration. The Nintendo Switch 2’s online library offers a diverse catalog spanning N64, SNES, Game Boy, and more. I revisited some old favorites and discovered new ones, including 2005’s Chibi-Robo!, a charm-filled game about a tiny robot helping a quirky girl in a frog hat. I also finally tackled Super Metroid, a sci-fi classic that remains superbly chilling. Keza MacDonald.
Keza contributes to Guardian’s Pushing Buttons, a weekly gaming newsletter. Sign up here (https://www.theguardian.com/games/series/pushing-buttons).
If you’d like to read the full, complete version of The Guide, consider subscribing to receive it in your inbox every Friday (https://www.theguardian.com/info/ng-interactive/2021/sep/14/guide-signup).
