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As much as Christmas trees, turkey and a mildly overworked Santa have become staples of the festive season, so has the music that soundtracks this cheer-soaked time of year. Christmas songs don’t just endure – many end up becoming the crown jewels of an artist’s entire career. From golden oldies by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Bing Crosby, to ‘80s icons like Wham! and The Pogues, to modern favourites from Ariana Grande and Leona Lewis, these tunes have embedded themselves into our seasonal rituals. What is the best-selling Christmas song of all time? That honour still belongs to Bing Crosby’s 1942 classic ‘White Christmas’. With over 50 million sales, it’s not only the biggest Christmas record in history – it’s the best-selling song of all time, full stop. Guinness World Records first crowned it back in 1955, and it’s held onto the title ever since. What is the most-streamed Christmas song of all time? Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ may trail Crosby in pure sales (a mere 16 million), but streaming has turned it into a seasonal juggernaut. It finally hit No.1 in both the UK and US decades after its release and became the first Christmas song to pass 2 billion Spotify streams. Hot on its heels: Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ (1.83 billion) and Brenda Lee’s ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ (1.27 billion). Are there any new Christmas songs for 2025? The past decade has delivered plenty of modern holiday staples, from Ariana Grande to Sabrina Carpenter to Cher....

Updated November 2025: From summer blockbusters to festival sleepers, these are the 25 movies our critics think define 2025 so far. Expect prestige dramas, horror gems, wild indies and some surprise streaming hits - all watched and ranked by Time Out’s film team. Quick Picks: 2025’s best films by genre: 😂 Best comedy: The Naked Gun 😱 Best horror movie: Weapons 🥋 Best action movie: One Battle After Another🎭 Best drama: Nickel Boys🪆 Best family film: Flow September brought Splitsville, a whip-smart indie screwball about two couples testing open marriages, The Lost Bus, Paul Greengrass’s tense wildfire epic starring an on-form Matthew McConaughey, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. With three quarters of the year gone, a few trends are starting to emerge. Superhero movies aren’t dead, but they’re no longer the guaranteed juggernauts they once were. Family films are booming. Gen Z is generating its own IP. Audiences still crave horror. And China’s home-grown hits are driving the global box office without Hollywood’s help. After years of post-pandemic hand-wringing, the film industry looks to be in better health than anyone expected. Sure, awards season could still change everything, but so far 2025 has given us plenty to celebrate – from genre-smashing auteur vehicles like Sinners and Weapons, to daring experiments such as The Nickel Boys, Flow and Better Man, and welcome returns from directors like Steven Soderbergh and Danny Boyle. In short, it’s...

For a holiday that’s all about family, football and eating yourself into a coma, Thanksgiving gets short shrift. Once the pumpkins hit the bins and the calendar flips over to November, thoughts turn not to turkey and decorative gourds but Mariah Carey and peppermint-scented candles. Thanksgiving is effectively the speed bump on the road to Christmas. So it is no surprise that Thanksgiving movies are hard to come by.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few Turkey Day classics out there worthy of annual viewings – movies that, like the Christmas flicks we all know and love, say something about what the holiday represents, at least in the contemporary, slightly ahistorical sense.  What makes a great Thanksgiving movie? As noted, Thanksgiving is predominantly a holiday about family togetherness – and the difficulties of being together as a family. Most great Thanksgiving movies reflect that dynamic, in one way or another. But it’s also important not to wallow in anxiety, no matter how relatable it might be. In fact, many of the best Thanksgiving movies qualify as dark comedies rather than painful trauma-dumps.  What are some great Thanksgiving movies? All that said, the definitive Thanksgiving movie is a screwball road movie that concludes that family is always worth going through hell for. Mixed in are awkwardly tense dramedies, all-star concert films, an underdog sports classic and at least one movie where someone gets bludgeoned to death with a meat tenderiser. All of...

It’s been an up-and-down year for film, with some heartening success stories, several saddening failures and a few world-conquering blockbusters that make you wonder if the future of movies is just video game adaptations aimed at tweens. But 2025 isn’t over yet. As we push into the chilliest months, Hollywood has saved some of the best – or, at least, biggest – for last, with the second half of one of 2024’s most dominant box-office phenomenons and the latest instalment of a billion-dollar franchise. In between, there’s also 18th century musicals about convulsing religious zealots, a sci-fi action satire featuring Glen Powell running for his life, and Timothee Chalamet making yet another Oscar push, portraying a champion 1950s ping-pong player. Here are the 20 movies we’re most excited to see this winter. Recommended: 🎥 The best movies of 2025 (so far)🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2025

November 2025 update: Jack Whitehall goes full psycho – yep! – in Malice, which also boasts David Duchovny and some Greek island resplendence, while the first part of the finale of Stranger Things bringing things in Hawkins to a shadowy end on November 26. Other new adds include the third part of the BBC’s exceptional Belfast cop show Blue Lights and a couple of notable Netflix sequels.We’ve all heard the phrase ‘TV’s golden age’ enough times over the past couple of decades to get wary of the hyperbole, but this year does seem to be shaping up to be a kind of mini golden age for the TV follow-up. Severance, Andor, Wednesday and Poker Face have all built on incredibly satisfying first seasons with equally masterful second runs. The third season of The White Lotus has proved that, whether you love it or find it a touch too languorous, there’s no escaping Mike White’s transgressive privilege-in-paradise satire. Likewise for season 7 of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian-flavoured sci-fi Black Mirror. More recently, HBO’s Task hit the spot with a blue-collar crime series that wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty. Watercooler viewing is everywhere at the moment, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, with Stranger Things coming to an end and about a zillion other things still come. Here’s everything you need to see... so far.  Best TV and streaming shows at a glance: 📍 The Pitt (Emmy Best Drama winner) – watch on HBO Max in the US📍 Adolescence (Best Limited Series winner) –...

Updates for 2025: New monsters are made every year, so we’ve added a few modern beasties we’re sure we’ll be haunting our nightmares for decades to come, including the latest interpretation of Nosferatu, the most grotesque of many abominations in The Substance and the horrifying, multi-mouthed demon from 2022’s Smile.  The movie industry has always been crawling with monsters, and we don’t just mean predatory agents and old-school studio heads. We’re talking about the monsters borne from childhood nightmares, or the deranged imaginations of some very creative adults. We’re talking predatory aliens. We’re talking vampires and werewolves. We’re talking skyscraper-sized apes, sentient globs of carnivorous space goo, interdimensional leather daddies and razor-toothed sewer clowns. In some cases, the monsters of cinema have become as famous as any actor – movie stars unto themselves.  It’s those most iconic beasts, demons and kaiju we’re saluting in this list of the greatest movie monsters of all-time. A few caveats: this list largely follows the same parameters as our monster movies list, meaning that it steers away from non-mutated animals – sorry, Bruce the Shark and the spiders from Arachnophobia – as well as slasher villains such as Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. But zombies? Trolls? Brundleflies? You’ll find them all below.  Quick picks: 📍 Best vampire: Nosferatu (Nosferatu, 1922)📍 Best kaiju: Godzilla (Godzilla, 1954)📍 Best zombie: Bub (Day of the Dead, 1985) 📍...

Horror knows no calendar. Sure, for casual fright fans, October might be considered Spooky Season. But for the genre’s true aficionados, any month, any day – shoot, any hour – is a good time for a scary movie. Be forewarned, though: series like Stranger Things and Midnight Mass notwithstanding, Netflix hasn’t churned out too many of its own upstanding horror flicks, but the platform does have a surprisingly decent amount of terrifying classics, new-school scares and hidden gems, from monster movies to zombie flicks to slashers. Here are the best horror movies currently streaming on Netflix right now.

It’s easy to forget that Halloween is primarily a holiday tailored to children, but Netflix hasn't. While it’s fun to fill the movie queue with adult-level scares, it’s important for parents to reserve some time for more entry-level frights, and the streamer has tons of Halloween-themed content that’s spookily entertaining for the wee ones but won’t have them hiding behind the couch. This October, grab a bowl of candy corn and throw on one of these great not-too-scary but oh-so-fun flicks for a family movie night aimed at the little ghouls in your house.   

Disney itself may not have produced as many great Christmas movies as you might assume, but at this point, the House of Mouse’s corporate umbrella is wide enough that Disney+ is positively exploding with cinematic holiday treats. Scroll through its library, and you’ll find everything from seasonal classics to original specials to cartoon shorts. Of course, as with any streamer, the sheer volume of content can be overwhelming – and there are quite a few lumps of coal mixed in there.  Thankfully, we’re in a giving mood – ’tis the season, after all. To make it easier to find the platform’s best holiday offerings, we’ve scoured Disney’s vast vault and separated the gingerbread from the fruitcake. Here are the 20 best Christmas movies sure to satisfy the entire family.  Recommended: 🎅 The 50 best Christmas movies of all-time🎄 The best kids Christmas movies to watch this year✍ The best animated Christmas movies for the whole family🐭 The best Disney Christmas movies to stream for the holidays

As the nights draw in and the chill sets through the air, there’s no denying it: spooky season has officially arrived. The pumpkins are carved, the costume’s nailed and now there’s just one thing left to summon… a Halloween playlist wicked enough to get even the undead on their feet. Sure, the classic Halloween songs still reign supreme – we’re talking ‘Thriller’, ‘Ghostbusters’ and all the usual heavy-hitters. But lately, a new wave of pop phantoms has emerged to soundtrack your October nights. From Olivia Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend bleeding her dry, to the enchanting spellwork of Lady Gaga a.k.a Mother Monster herself, with a detour through the slick, otherworldly beats of K-Pop’s most stylish demons – Halloween playlists have, quite literally, come back to life. Our favourite Halloween playlist songs for 2025 at a glance: Most iconic Halloween track: ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson Best new Halloween anthem: ‘Abracadabra’ by Lady Gaga Most dramatic Halloween song: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras Best Halloween anthem with a K-Pop twist: ‘Your Idol’ by Saja Boys Best Halloween track to dance to: ‘Monster Mash’ by Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers RECOMMENDED: 👻 The best Halloween movies of all time 🎤 The best karaoke songs 🎵 The best songs of 2025 so far 🕺 The best albums of 2025 so far