It’s that time of the year when pundits (like me!) recommend the best in entertainment from 2025. These recommendations you will find on few other lists, I guarantee it. Certainly not in Maclean’s or The Globe and Mail, or even The Guardian in the UK.
In Another Ruined Dinner Party, I offer my top three choices plus honourable mentions.
To find a short review and sometimes a film trailer, click on the hyperlink.
Best wishes for the new year – given what’s going on in the world. There’s always time for you to speak out and to act.
Don’t Stop Talking about Gaza!
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Streamed Films
Honourable Mentions: 1. Club Zero 2. Sense of an Ending 3. The Worst Person in the World. 4. The Teachers’ Lounge 5. The Leopard 6. The Seventh Year (1968)
Series & Episodes
Honourable Mentions: 1. In Plain Sight 2. Gold 3. The Diplomat 4. Secrets We Keep
Murder and Mayhem
Honourable Mentions: 1. Unforgotten 2. Inside Man 3. Tokyo Vice
Best Documentaries
Honourable Mentions: 1. Gaza: Doctors Under Attack 2. The Perfect Neighbor 3. Grenfell Uncovered 4. When it Stopped being a War: the Situated Testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah 5. Kids Under Fire: An investigation into Israeli Soldiers Shooting Children
Books
Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide, by Atef Abu Saif
What You Have Heard is True: A memoir of witness and resistance by Carolyn Forché
Chile in Our Hearts by John Dinges. I just read this 2025 book; here is a review from The Nation. Excellent book about the murders of Americans Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in Chile by Pinochet’s military after the coup in 1973. First rate.
Honourable Mentions: 1.Against the Loveless World (novel by Susan Abulhawa) 2. Let Them by Mel Robbins 6. Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, by Tom O’Neill. The “Helter Skelter” theory (invented and curated by American prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi) is tossed out the window in this fascinating history that links Manson and his “family” to the CIA’s MKUltra, to big Hollywood stars, and to a record contract for Manson. Just listened to it on Libby from Halifax Public Libraries.
Truly Canadian
Under the Bridge (on CBC GEM)
Empathie– excellent Québec series
Anatomy of a Coverup: The Truth about the RCMP and the Nova Scotia Massacres, by Paul Palango.
Extraordinary by David Gilmour (2014). The author in this novel is 15 years junior to his stepsister, Sally. One night she asks him for a favour that is both shocking yet understandable. I think it’s Gilmour’s best novel– I’m a fan.
Surviving the Hockey Canada Scandal, on the Canadian True Crime podcast. A very good two part series of podcasts. Then there is a 5 part series Analyzing thge Hockey Canada Trial — brilliant.
Standing Up to Big Nickel: The Story of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Strike, 1958 by Elizabeth Quinlan (2025). First off, the author is a good friend of mine. Secondly, the book is magical — through newspaper clippings, interviews and archival research, Quinlan puts together a book that recounts what happened in this infamous Sudbury, Ont. strike; she analyses the forces within the Mine Mill and Smelter Workers (MMSW) union – and INCO’s management. For one thing, Quinlan writes, Canada was in the grips of a recession in 1958, an excuse employers used to resist increasing workers’ wages.
“For another, the ubiquitous Cold War politics sent left-led unions like MMSW running for cover at the same time that corporate Canada was intent on pushing back workers’ gains made during the war.” (see book’s preface)
Leading from the Heart: the battles of a feminist union leader and politician by Judy Darcy. I haven’t reviewed the book yet, but I just finished reading this autobiography by former CUPE national president Judy Darcy. This is a vital and worthwhile contribution to union struggles and the left in Canada.
Pretty Heady Stuff is a podcast about radicals and politics by Scott Stoneman in Halifax. He interviewed me for this segment.
On-the-Line news podcast, also on Youtube, with Samira Mohyeddin — a journalist with guts in Toronto.
Sense and Solidarity – co-hosted by my son, Max Haiven (Canadian), and by Sarah Stein Lubrano (American) — politics with a very different left take- the psychological, the sociological and the radical. Delightful.
Podcasts
- Central Intelligence
- Death Cap Mushrooms -foraging and a dehydrator: Erin Patterson takes the stand.
- Bone Valley, Series 2 (and series 1)
Image at the top: “Suicide total Paris” ( L’Association 2023), by Julie Doucet. A detail from the outdoor mural, part of the exhibit Graphic World, at The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Another ruined dinner party... 