From the most beautiful show Netflix has ever made to a thriller about a menopausal hitwoman and a dazzling documentary set in outer space, here are some TV gems that may have passed you by this year
In a bizarre move, Netflix released this series by Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda – the Palme d’Or winner renowned for movies such as Shoplifters and Nobody Knows – with absolutely no fanfare this year. But Asura was a total knockout – a rich and sumptuously shot drama about four sisters in the 70s who discover that their dad has been having a lifelong affair. It was so good, in fact, that it might even be the most beautiful show they’ve ever released. Talk about selling yourself short. Watch it on Netflix.
Attenborough, 99, enthuses about tube-riding pigeons, foxes, parakeets and others in Wild London for the BBC
Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.
Ukrainian leader had sought up to 50 years of security guarantees at Florida meeting with Trump
The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists this morning that Moscow agreed with Donald Trump’s assessment that talks to end the war were in their final stage.
As a reminder, Trump said a draft agreement to end the war was nearly “95% done”. “I really think we are closer than ever with both sides,” he said, though he added that “one or two very thorny issues” remain.
What has your experience been of trying to future-proof your career? Have you retrained or moved jobs because your previous career path is at risk of an artificial intelligence takeover?
The UK is poised for an influx of cheap Chinese imports that could bring down inflation amid the fallout from Donald Trump’s global trade war, leading economists have said.
After figures showed China’s trade surplus surpassed $1tn (£750bn) despite Washington’s tariff policies hitting exports to the US, the Bank of England said the UK was among the nations emerging as alternative destinations for the goods.
I’d like to believe that the horrific darkness of this past year is a necessary prelude to a brighter and saner future
About a year ago, at the start of the Trump 2.0 regime, a woman was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me and almost shouted: “It’s a fucking nightmare!”
Bears are becoming a growing problem in some of Japan’s urban areas as they are forced to venture further in search of food
It came as no surprise, least of all to the residents of Osaki, that “bear” was selected as Japan’s kanji character of the year earlier this month.
The north-eastern town of 128,000 people is best known for its Naruko Onsen hot springs, autumn foliage and kokeshi – cylindrical dolls carved from a single piece of wood. But this year it has made the headlines as a bear hotspot, as the country reels from a year of record ursine encounters and deaths, with warnings that winter will not bring immediate respite.
Sex is an appetite like any other and there is much you can do to make it a priority, from making sure you find the time for it to building your confidence and maintaining intimacy throughout the day
If you have sex, chances are, you’ll have a good day. But scheduling it makes it feel like a chore. And unlike any other chore or fitness enterprise, you conceive it more as self-indulgence than self-improvement, and as such, even if you’re already in a relationship, it’s hard to find that chin-out determination to get it done. Yet sex is an appetite like any other, a necessity like any other, a nourishment like any other. If you let it go dormant the effect on your relationship might be as if one or both of you are on a permanent diet – and also lonely. That might be fine for both of you, but for many of us, sex is a thing worth prioritising.
At its core, before you introduce any other domestic obstacles, it’s a two-person job, so you have to be attuned to one another; you can’t just decide unilaterally. To take this in ascending order of hurdles; if you’re a childless couple, the main block is going to be each other – not being in the same mood at the same time, not being in the house at the same time. This is true for your entire relationship, not just sex; I once interviewed a fertility doctor, who described working with a couple, trying to find an appointment time for when one was ovulating and both were in the country. They scrolled through several weeks before they managed it. “I felt as if I was beginning to get to the bottom of why they couldn’t conceive,” she said.
This haunting poem depicts an elusive, dangerous figure of overwhelming destructive power
The Man in the Wind
The man in the wind
who keeps us awake tonight
is not the black monk of the wind
cowering in corners and crevices,
or the white face under the streetlight
stricken with the guilt of his noise,
or the great slapping hand of the wind
beating and beating the rainy alleyways
while the torturer proceeds with the interrogation
and the prisoner’s risen voice
bleeds over cymbals and timpani.
Ageing populations and falling birthrates have left ever fewer workers to support growing number of retirees
It has played a starring role in one of the worst periods of political turmoil in France since the 1960s. In Germany, it threatens the future of the coalition government. In Spain, thousands have taken to the streets to demand change.
The right to a decent state pension has been a central plank of the European social contract for decades, but people are living longer, birthrates are falling, and the continent’s pension systems are, increasingly, unsustainable.
YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts
Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.
As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.
PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5; Embark Studios The breakout hit, which has players coming together (or turning on each other) to battle intimidating robots in an apocalyptic future, is worth the hype
Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter from Embark Studios – so, a game where you deploy into a map full of other players and do as much shooting and looting as you can before making an escape. This is my first real go at the genre, and it’s excellent. It has smooth, only occasionally cumbersome combat, sound design that scratches the brain just right and robotic enemies that genuinely terrify. And it satisfies my constant need to sift through my inventory and rifle through every drawer.
But I have to keep my head on a swivel: Arc Raider’s player v player element means I can get jumped for my precious cargo by a malicious rival at any moment. And also, the knowledge that this game was made with the help of generative AI voice acting makes me slightly ashamed of how much I enjoy it. I play every game sheepishly looking over my shoulder (and my character’s) in case someone in-game takes my sought-after blueprint, or someone in real life kicks down my door to call me a hypocrite.
The latest in our series of writers highlighting their most rewatched comfort films is an ode to the charming 80s-set comedy
While casting his knockout quasi-biopic The Social Network, film-maker David Fincher must’ve really dug how eventual Mark Zuckerberg portrayer Jesse Eisenberg handled being dumped on screen. A year before the award-lassoing Facebook drama, which led to an Oscar nomination for Eisenberg, the actor agonised through the dreamy foreground of Adventureland as reluctant carny James Brennan.
The parallels between Fincher’s and Greg Mottola’s movies begin and end with their opening unceremonious separations, yet an admittedly romantic logic does allow me to soak in the notion that the great directorial mind behind such zingers as Zodiac and Gone Girl also found solace in this cinematic time machine.
Young men swapping Nike Tech fleeces for quarter-zips are all over TikTok, as well as staging IRL meetups worldwide. What’s behind the growing movement centring a once unremarkable garment?
As I’m wearing a quarter-zip jumper and sipping on an iced matcha, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s my last day of term before the school holidays. The giveaway is it’s a Saturday in London’s Soho, and I’m surrounded by 20 or so young men between the ages of 13 and 21 who are all here for London’s first ever “quarter-zip meetup”.
Organised, rather bizarrely, by sibling rappers OKay the Duo, the meetup is the latest manifestation of a growing tongue-in-cheek trend for quarter-zips and matcha that has taken over TikTok globally. Previous meetups have taken place in Houston and Rotterdam.
Spring-like weather experienced by many Americans to end, while heavy snow in Japan brings deadly conditions
A week of extremes in the US as Arctic air plunges southwards across many states, sweeping away record-breaking warmth from last weekend. With low pressure in the west drawing up warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico, much of the south and midwest basked in spring-like weather this weekend with temperatures widely an extraordinary 15-20C above normal for late December.
This week, however, most people will ditch their summer clothes for hats and scarves as a ridge pressure builds across the west, allowing for a polar air mass to dive southward, bringing freezing temperatures and the risk of snow.
‘Too much in favour of bowlers,’ says match referee
No batter made a half-century
The MCG pitch has been rated ‘unsatisfactory’ by the International Cricket Council after England beat Australia inside two days in the fourth Ashes Test. The head curator, Matthew Page, said he was in a “state of shock” at how the match unfolded on a surface that had 10mm grass left on, producing lavish movement for seam bowlers.
Despite their four-wicket win, the England captain, Ben Stokes, said there would be “hell on” if the Melbourne pitch was produced elsewhere in the world and the ICC has handed down its second-lowest rating.
Former House speaker on ABC News also said congressional Republicans have ceded almost all their power to Trump
Democrats will retake the US House’s majority in the 2026 midterm elections, the chamber’s former speaker Nancy Pelosi has confidently predicted – and she hopes her party colleagues then seize back the congressional power that Republicans have all but ceded to Donald Trump.
Asked Sunday on ABC News’s This Week if she had any doubts over whether Democratic New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries would hold the speaker’s gavel after the elections midway through Trump’s second presidency, Pelosi said: “None.”
Cliche-ridden, excessively sentimental and lacking in historical rigour, this film is a grave act of nationalist self-soothing
Nothing says happy Hanukah like a Holocaust-themed movie, especially if it ends on a feelgood note of survival and reunion after a run of tragic deaths and lashings of suffering. But this Israeli-Belarusian co-production is so excessively sentimental, cliche-riddled and arguably hypocritical considering its provenance, it’s not easy to forbear.
It opens in contemporary Tel Aviv with an elderly man named Ilya receiving news he can barely believe is true: someone dear to him from his childhood is alive. This prompts Ilya to tell his grandsons for the first time about what happened to him during the second world war. Desaturated cinematography then unfolds his story in flashback, showing young Ilya (Andrey Davidyuk) and his little brother Sasha as preteen Jewish boys living in Minsk with their parents, just as the war starts. Dad goes off to the front and is never seen again; the brothers and their mother are soon rounded up by the Nazis, represented by one German actor (Jean-Marc Birkholz) who keeps cropping up throughout to ruin life for Ilya. It’s as if the production didn’t have enough budget to afford a second German-speaking actor or (charitably) because the film-makers are making some kind of symbolic point about the banality – or in this case indistinguishability – of evil. I suspect the former is the case.
A deep dive into the creation of eight buildings from the 1700s to the 1900s tells some very human stories
History used to be about wars and dates, but to the architecture writer and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, it’s more about floors and grates. In his new book, he takes a keen-eyed tour of eight English houses, from Northumberland to Sussex, dating from the early 1700s to exactly 100 years ago, and ranging from an outlandish gothic pile to one of the first council flats. In Cruickshank’s pages, classical influences from Rome and Greece give way to a revival of medieval English gothic and the emergence of modernism.
He is particularly interested in who commissioned and built his chosen dwellings, and how they got the job done. It’s a new spin on the recent fashion for historians to explore the homes of commoners, as opposed to royalty and aristocrats, in order to tell the life stories of their occupants. This probably began with the late Gillian Tindall, who wrote a highly original book about the various tenants of an old house by the Thames next to the rebuilt Globe theatre. That was followed by several series of A House Through Time, fronted by Traitors star David Olosuga.
In his memoir, the author recalls the boy he loved while growing up in Jordan – and weaves the tale with his family’s history of dispossession
Seven decades after Tareq Baconi’s grandmother fled in terror from the port city of Haifa, carrying a Bible, a crucifix and a week’s worth of clothes, he followed her directions to the family home a few blocks from the sea.
The building was still standing, almost as she had left it in 1948, instantly familiar from childhood stories. Standing beside his husband, Baconi could not bring himself to ring the bell, to find out who was living in the rooms that held Eva’s childhood memories.
The world’s largest accounting body is to stop students being allowed to take exams remotely to crack down on a rise in cheating on tests that underpin professional qualifications.
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), which has almost 260,000 members, has said that from March it will stop allowing students to take online exams in all but exceptional circumstances.
Campaigner recently released from prison makes statement after PM’s support is questioned by Tory MPs
Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British-Egyptian human rights campaigner, has apologised unreservedly for what he accepted were shocking and hurtful tweets that he wrote more than 10 years ago in what he described as heated online battles.
He said he was shaken by the criticism that has rained down on him since the tweets were highlighted by shadow ministers challenging Keir Starmer’s support for him since he was released by the Egyptian government to travel to the UK after his release from more than 10 years in prison.
These unfairly maligned animals were nuggets for our ancestors and served for the UK during the second world war
Is there something I would figuratively die on a hill for? Yes, there is – and as it happens, I’m sitting on a literal hill right now, feeding them. Pigeons. Why pigeons? Because it’s about time they get the respect they deserve.
I like pigeons. Because they’re like me, working class. You can tell pigeons are working class because every pigeon looks knackered. It’s about this point in the conversation that people politely make their excuses and slowly back away (literally) while avoiding eye contact. No doubt, reading this, you are doing the same (figuratively).
Toussaint Douglass is a comedian from Lewisham, south London. His show Accessible Pigeon Material will be showing at Soho Theatre, 26-31 January 2026
The Guardian sport photographer selects his favourite images he has taken this year and recalls the stories behind them
This is a selection of some of my favourite pictures taken at events I’ve covered this year, quite a few of which haven’t been published before. Several have been chosen for their news value, others purely for their aesthetic value, while some are here just because there’s a nice story behind them.
Connexion
