2025 Cultural Highlights

As the year draws to a close, rs21 members review their cultural highlights of 2025.

One Battle after Another by Lee (East London branch)

While not my top favourite, One Battle After Another will go down as the defining film of the year, capturing one’s existence as an inherent political subject in the face of the police state. Both incredibly thorny and urgent, it may be director Paul Thomas Anderson’s most personal film, as it ruminates on his own relationship with his mixed race daughter – the world she is growing up in and will grow up in. 

The film lays bare how leftwing organising efforts can become entangled with ego and LARPing fantasies, forcing an uncomfortable realisation: if we are not moving toward connection and love, how different are we from those who oppress? If our ancestors failed, and the revolution packaged as Warner Bros entertainment starring a dude building luxury hotels in Tel Aviv and soundtracked by a Zionist, what are we doing that’s different? And how will we be remembered?

Red Sonja by Sumyra (Edinburgh branch)

Red Sonja directed by MJ Bassett received all the usual criticisms that any film will get if it doesn’t feature a straight white man on a rampage. Most of my fellow comic geeks also loved it because we know the character and that she is not supposed to be in some slick, complex epic fantasy. Instead, the film delivers exactly what a good Sonja origin story should: indomitable spirit, fierce combat, camaraderie, a cool horse, and our girl getting drunk in a tavern. It also has some nice subtle ecological and social themes.

Visually, it looks only slightly more expensive than an old episode of Xena: Warrior Princess and that is a good thing. In this age of AI slop and overblown visual effects that rarely produce anything as stunning as Aliens or Blade Runner, I would be happy to see more films like this. Low-budget, well written, free of ‘A-list’ actors, fun, like Red Sonja.

Pride – Tim Tate with LGSM by Colin F (South London branch)

I found this book by chance on display when I walked into my local library. Shout out to libraries! This is the story behind the brilliant film Pride. For those unfamiliar: during the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-5 a group of lesbians and gay men organised collections for the strikers’ families in pubs and clubs across London, before taking the money to a pit village in South Wales. There was trepidation and at times prejudice, on both sides but the film tells the story of how this relationship developed with great humour and deep emotion. The book goes much further, digging into the experiences and politics of the situation in the words of those who lived it. It’s a brilliant piece of oral history, capturing the highs and lows of everyday life and the extraordinary effects of the year of intense struggle for livelihoods and lives. Friendships and solidarity are central to how this militant bond was built. 

Entwined with the strike and the clash of cultures are the attacks by the Tory government, not only against the miners, labelled and harassed as the ‘enemy within’ by Thatcher, but also against the lesbian and gay community. These attacks centred around the early spread of HIV and the media’s demonisation of gay lifestyles and culture. The book is every bit as enjoyable, emotional and inspiring as the film and even more enlightening in the reminiscences and reflections of those involved. If you’re looking for insight into how ideas change through struggle and debate, this is a riveting and stimulating read. 

Sheffield Writers for Palestine workshop by Mark S (Sheffield branch)

At this year’s Sheffield Transformed Festival, I took part in a poetry workshop led by Sheffield Writers for Palestine. We used pieces by Mohammed Moussa, Ruba Al Faleet, and Sophia Thakur as inspiration for our own poetry about the Palestinian struggle and the genocide in Gaza. We were only given between 5-10 minutes to write each piece but that limitation actually helped dispel any writers’ block.

Everyone’s poetry was heartfelt and moving with people exploring emotions and themes of grief, anger, guilt, resistance and solidarity. I’m not someone who writes poetry in their daily life but I found the experience a powerful means of exploring my own thoughts and feelings and sharing them honestly with others. The workshop was a striking demonstration that the shared experience of reading, writing and discussing poetry together can help to build significant connections and collective understanding. And, ultimately, it’s such connection and understanding that are at the heart of all emancipatory politics.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by Rachel E (General branch)

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of John LeCarre’s earliest novels set in the heightened tensions of the Cold War. The protagonist Alec Leamas is an alcoholic – divorced, estranged from his children and drinking to dull the guilt of losing an agent. It is one of LeCarre’s saddest works focussing not on the games that spies play but rather the lives lost and ruined through espionage and the state. 

This stage adaptation at Soho Place is set in the round, making the production very intimate (probably more intimate for us as our tickets were upgraded from a restricted view to the best tickets in the house!). Alec Leamas is haunted by ghosts: the dead agent, his lover, and characters such as Control and George Smiley. This production unsettles the image of George Smiley made familiar from the 1970’s television, in which Alec Guinness portrayed him as a reluctant participant in a game that had to be played to protect British interests. This adaptation exposes this softly spoken, cardigan-wearing intellectual as a ruthless agent of the state. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is showing at Soho Place until February and then embarks on a national tour from March. 

Algiers, Third World Capital by Eve H (North London branch)

This year I read Algiers, Third World Capital by Elaine Mokhtefi, a memoir of Mokhtefi’s life working as a translator and press officer for Algeria’s newly independent government. Alongside this, she collaborated with members of the Black Panther party, who were in exile from the United States in Algeria. She later works as a journalist and helped organise the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. I would recommend this book as a non-judgmental eyewitness account of what it’s like to work in government adjacent roles post-independence, and the practical and emotional difficulties of reckoning with flawed leaders. 

A Real Pain by Clara H (South London branch)

One of my cultural highlights of 2025 was Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, which follows two Jewish cousins from New York on a journey through Poland to honour their Holocaust-survivor grandmother’s homeland. Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) are opposites: the former living in his mother’s basement, the latter a successful ad salesman and father. Culkin brings a Succession-honed vulnerability to the role, which is a touching exploration of family, trauma, the afterlives of genocide and the ways we remember. One of the bitter aftertastes the leaves is the silence surrounding the slaughter in Palestine during its press tour – a silence refused by Jonathan Glazer when he accepted an Academy Award for the haunting film The Zone of Interest last year. 

Empty churches by Grace LC (East London branch)

My cultural highlight this year has been churches when they are empty. No shade on churches when they are full; I understand that these can have their own appeal. Notre Dame du Travail in Paris was a standout for the interior decoration (the ironwork and the sexy blacksmith wall painting). I loved Fairfield Church in Kent, also St Clements which is nearby and is where Derek Jarman is buried. The former used to be accessible only by ferry for part of the year (‘water-bound/ from autumn to the spring’), and the latter is painted a very pale and lovely shade of pink on the inside. Where else is there beauty, shelter and quiet for free these days? Speaking a bit more directly to the brief, perhaps, I’d like to add that my film, poetry, and album highlights of the year were, in order: On Falling directed by Laura Carreira, Recent Poems by Hugh Foley and Remscela by Milkweed.

Coven by Andy S (East London)

Coven by Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute is a play based around the 1612 Pendle witch trials that has the potential to be worthy yet dramatically pedestrian. We all know who the villains are, and they are not the (mostly) women persecuted through denunciations, coerced confessions and brutal punishment. But this all-woman cast, directed by Miranda Cromwell, takes this setting and imbues it with depth and humanity. Most of all, they find a way to transform righteous indignation into inspiration. Coven begins with all its leads locked up, awaiting trials that they can expect to be travesties even by the standards of the time. Among their number is Jenet, played by Gabrielle Brooks, who as a nine year old accused her own family of witchcraft, and now, as an adult, faces the same charge. She initially feels herself to be above her fellow accused, whose guilt she assumes, as does the local landowner’s wife, Frances (Shiloh Coke). 

The journey from this set-up to the ultimate show of defiance and solidarity is soundtracked with an excellent array of moving songs, performed with gusto by the talented cast. Like the dialogue, they hint at the past (e.g., with folk influences) while also embracing more contemporary genres. The injustice of land dispossession through enclosure is one of the themes, but is understandably subsidiary to that of women’s oppression and resistance. The highlight of the night for me, and for the history students I took along,  was Allyson Ava-Brown leading the spine-tingling anthem ‘Care’, a message about defending women’s reproductive rights with resonance for today. Coven is still showing at the Kiln theatre into January. Catch it if you can.

For music highlights of 2025, please check back here. Happy holidays from the rs21 website team!