Illustration by David Cooper, Supplied
On Dec. 23, film editor Barry Hertz, television critic J. Kelly Nestruck and arts reporter Josh O’Kane answered reader questions on the best music, film and TV of the year, what to look forward to in 2026, and what readers thought should have been on their lists.
Our writers highlighted films such as One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme, albums by Geese and Hayley Williams, and television shows like Adolescence and The Pitt as top contenders for the year, among many others.
The best movies, TV shows, music and more from 2025
Readers asked them to defend their picks, as well as suggested some other notable pieces from 2025 that were worth mentioning. Here are some highlights from the Q&A.
2025’s most notable TV, music and film
Q: What are some Canadian-made standouts this year?
Nestruck: I have North of North (CBC/APTN/Netflix) and Empathie (Crave) on my top ten list and that was without any nationalistic shoehorning.
Heated Rivalry (Crave) started to come out was I writing my top ten and I’m not sure it would land on my best of everything, but I love what a conversation-starter it has been at parties and online.
There was a lot original and compelling about Mae Martin’s Wayward (Netflix). CBC’s starting to add more Quebec series with subtitles – and I was quite moved by the working-class family drama Veille sur moi (Watch over me) that originally aired in 2024 on Radio-Canada.
I hope we see more of that – and ideally all CBC and Radio-Canada content shared with subtitles between in Gem and ici.tou.tv. We’re all paying for those shows, and streamers like Netflix have their shows available with dozens of language options.
O’Kane: Justin Bieber’s SWAG brought him more deeply into critical conversations this year than perhaps any album since 2015’s Purpose. The Montreal post-punk band Ribbon Skirt released a fantastic album called Bite Down. Toronto’s Rochelle Jordan put out the album Through the Wall, which is really accessible, infectious dance music. Toronto punks PUP write with extreme clarity and occasional hilarity about the anxieties of daily life, and their album Who Will Look After The Dogs? will probably go down as one of their best.
Illustration by The Globe and Mail; Supplied
Q: Is there anything that you think could already be in contention for best of the decade?
Hertz: Of this year, I think One Battle After Another is a generational film. I could see it being revisited for decades to come.
Nestruck: Adolescence, for sure.
O’Kane: On the music side, watching the rise of the New York rock band Geese, and their front man Cameron Winter, has been astounding. I first saw Geese in Toronto in 2024 and thought they were a very talented crew, but I couldn’t have imagined how much they’d blow up. Let alone that Winter would receive almost the same amount of acclaim for his solo work in the same year! I would wager one or both of Geese’s album Getting Killed and Winter’s Heavy Metal will wind up pretty high in end-of-the-decade critical lists.
Missing from The Globe’s lists
Q: Why didn’t Sinners make the top movies list?
Hertz: I’ve been getting this question more than anything else. I appreciated Sinners, and I think there are some great elements to the film. But its central themes just didn’t work for me, and I thought that, for a vampire movie (or a movie that turns into a vampire movie), the action was too choppy. Very enjoyable flick, but not one of the year’s 10, or even 15 best.
Illustration by The Globe and Mail; Supplied
Q: Any disappointments? Things you thought would have been better than they ended up being?
Hertz: There were almost too many high-profile disappointments to fit into the remaining characters I have left in this reply. Katherine Bigelow’s House of Dynamite was a whiff. I didn’t vibe with Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein left me cold. And those are just this year’s Netflix titles. Elsewhere, I expected more from the latest (maybe last) Mission: Impossible film, Edgar Wright’s incredibly frustrating The Running Man, Luca Guadagnino’s baffling After the Hunt, and more titles that I’ve just blocked out.
Q: My favourite series was Slow Horses. Clever, fast moving. [editor’s note: It was not on our best TV of the year list]
Nestruck: I love Slow Horses as well – and so did The Globe and Mail’s now-retired TV critic John Doyle when he reviewed the first season back in 2022.
For the purpose of my top ten list, I considered only shows that had their first season in 2025. But SH is one that I watch every year whether I’m writing about it or not. Lots of other shows try to nail its tone – darkly comic, but still gripping as a spy thriller – and miss. And obviously Gary Oldman’s performance as Jackson Lamb is one of the most enjoyably louche out there.
Q: Why didn’t Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl make the best albums list?
O’Kane: I can say there is a growing critical consensus that Taylor Swift’s magic is ebbing, at least somewhat, after her incredible run of hits in the 2010s through Folklore and Evermore. I say this as someone who counts Swift’s 1989 tour as delivering one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Not to say she’s phoning it in – but even dipping to the top 20, say, instead of the top 10, *does* allow room to celebrate the artistry of other artists. You can also see my colleague Aisling Murphy’s disappointed review of the album here.
Q: I thought it was interesting that The Chair Company didn’t make the top 10 or honourable mention for TV. One of the most watched HBO comedies ever and it gets 100% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
Nestruck: The Chair Company was on a lot of American critics’ top ten lists. Comedy, in particular, is so subjective and I appreciate the originality of the series – but I prefer Tim Robinson’s work on sketch show I Think You Should Leave. I just found something a little tiring about spending this much time with this one character of his, and ditched it after sampling a few episodes.
O’Kane: I am not a television critic, but I am a Tim Robinson fan – and I can say that on a personal level that I loved the world-building he did with The Chair Company. Where the movie Friendship kind of felt like dropping a character from I Think You Should Leave into the real world with mixed results, The Chair Company felt like a universe *populated* by Tim Robinson characters, each with little Robinsonian hangups. In that way, it felt a little bit like the world of Twin Peaks to me… and I also love Twin Peaks. Anyway, Kelly Nestruck is the expert here, and has already shared his thoughtful views. I’m just a guy who once made a T.C. Tuggers shirt for Halloween.
Illustration by The Globe and Mail; Chris Carlson/CP, Christopher Wahl/The Globe and Mail, Mario Anzuoni/Reuters, Laura Proctor/CP, Supplied
Q: I haven’t seen Marty Supreme, but could a movie starring Kevin O’Leary really be one of the best of the year?
Hertz: I’m here to regrettably report: yes. I would rather spend the rest of my life never having to think of Kevin O’Leary or even write his name down. But he is very, very good in this movie. And the film itself is a riot.
The life of a culture critic
Q: Where do you go to find new music, movies and TV shows?
Nestruck: There are teams of publicists out there for the American streamers to tell me about their shows, so I think my job is partly to tune out that noise that could easily consume me as much as possible, and try to find things to write about on TV that other people aren’t.
I find TikTok and Instagram a great place to see what’s trending in the televisual. It was clear, for instance, that Heated Rivalry was going to be a hit for Crave because of all the social-media content that users were creating about it.
Another example: There’s a whole cottage industry around writing about SNL and the late shows in the U.S., and it’s always felt to me like 22 Minutes on CBC gets short shrift. So I’m always keeping an eye on their socials for when one of their sketches is suddenly viral on social media, like Mark Critch’s very funny trade-war grocery store sketch from earlier this year that reached close to 20 million views
O’Kane: For nearly two decades, the first thing I’ve done when I get on a computer in the morning is look at music websites – Pitchfork, Exclaim, Billboard, Stereogum, etc. I like to listen to at least one new album a day, be it something rising in the charts or gaining critical acclaim.
Hertz: For movies, I’m lucky enough to essentially be force-fed them. I get press releases and emails from all the major distributors and streamers and festivals about what’s coming up, with offers of access. Of course things slip through the cracks, especially as some streamers like to give advance warning of, say, 24 hours. But I try to be dilligent!
Opinion: Art is a form of communication between human beings. AI won’t change that
Q: I believe that AI inherently cannot have intent. Its generative nature merely guesses at the author’s intent described in its instructions. Do you kind folks share my view, or do you think there is still a role for AI in achieving or maybe even refining an author’s vision for their art?
Hertz: I 100% share your view, which is an opinion that seems to be increasingly shifted to the minority position. I don’t think AI has a place in the creative process unless it’s deep in the bare bones of needlessly time-consuming tasks, such as transcription or maximizing time efficiency for digital artists when it comes to rendering images, say. If AI is put in place to cost a single human artist their livelihood, well, that I cannot abide.
O’Kane: This is a great question, and one I’ve tried to interrogate since generative AI tools came into wide use three years ago. Without spoiling too much of a story that’s coming soon, I can say that I’m seeing a chasm widening between creative workers and creative industries over where to draw the line between using AI as a tool to augment expression, and AI fully replacing human expression by recombining existing pieces of art. A growing number of musicians, I’ve found for instance, want the line drawn closer to no AI at all. Sometimes it comes down to whether someone sees creative work as art or a product, which is a much older philosophical debate.
Looking ahead
Q: Is there anything in particular you’re looking forward to in 2026?
Hertz: There are a ton of promising films coming in 2026, including new work from Steven Spielberg (Disclosure Day), Christopher Nolan (The Odyssey), Alejandro González Iñárritu (normally not my fav, but this time he’s working with Tom Cruise on Digger), Greta Gerwig (Narnia), Sam Raimi (Send Help), Danny Boyle (Ink), and on and on. You know, if the entire industry doesn’t collapse between now and then.
Submissions have been edited for length and clarity.