Arts In 30

Ce and Sky share their favourite picks of 2025.

Movies mentioned includes Freaky Tales, KPop Demon Hunters, Twinless, Sirat, The Secret Agent, Sinners, One Battle After Another, and One of Them Days.

Music mentioned includes Kathryn Joseph - We Were Made Prey, Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You; Perfume Genius - live & Glory; Billy Woods - Golliwog; Backxwash - Only Dust Remains; Abel Selaocoe - Hymns of Bantu; Ganavya; Jaime Martin & the SSO - Bolero.

Theatre mentioned includes the Siegfried and Roy opera, Hadestown, Beetlejuice, and Scout Boxall's God's Favourite.

And in poetry: Evelyn Araluen's The Rot and The Nightmare Sequence by Omar Sakr & Safdar Ahmed.

Rudi Bremer from Awaye joins the team to take us to the NGA where After The Rain, the fifth National Indigenous Art Triennial is bringing together a remarkable collection of work under the supervision of Artistic Director Tony Albert.

And with Summer holidays ahead, we recommend our TV shows of the year for your binge-watching pleasure. Ce chooses Wayward, Sky picks The Lowdown, and Rudi argues for The Residence.

Hidden Rivalry might not make the end of years list, but it has Ce and Rudi watching and fondly reminiscing about Yuri! On Ice!!

Sky looks ahead at some of the most interesting art-house releases of the Summer season, including The History of Sound, Sentimental Value and No Other Choice.

Ce is very unimpressed with Maggie Nelson's new book, which tries to compare and contrast the work and lives of Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath.

And the biggest hip-hop artist in the world, Kendrick Lamar, is currently on tour around the country.

Last week, the federal government passed legislation that will require video streaming services with more than 1 million Australian subscribers to invest 10 percent of their Australian expenditure or 7.5 percent of their gross Australian revenue into new Australian productions each year. 

The bill passed with the support of the Greens, and as part of the negotiations, the ABC will also receive $50 million in additional funding over 3 years to spend on locally made children’s and drama content. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, arts spokeswoman for The Greens, joins us to talk about the bills and about Federal arts priorities in 2026.

And reports suggest that the State Library of Victoria will cut its reference librarians from 25 to 10, reduce its publicly available computers and remove their children’s and family engagement officers in a new round of reforms. The Library has pushed back against the reporting.

Gideon Haigh, award-winning writer and passionate advocate for the library, shares his perspectives on the changes, the messages he's heard from current and former staff, and mounts the case for the importance of the state institution.

Our track of the week is Evensong, part 1 by JJJJJerome Ellis

Three films in, at a point where most franchises have run out of ideas and started phoning it in, Knives Out has returned with its best episode yet in Wake Up Dead Man. With a star turn by Josh O'Connor and an exceptional ensemble, it's an examination of faith and belief, of the potential for good will and redemption, and of the negative power of anger, corruption, and hatred, all wrapped up in a fun and funny mystery.

And speaking of examinations of corruption, power, and hatred: Disney’s Zootopia 2 is also out this week. Sky claims that its a delightful buddy comedy that continues the excellent world-building of the original and has more sight-gags and Easter eggs than you could possible notice in one sitting. Plus it manages to present a pro-community, pro-diversity, anti-racism, anti-corruption message without overdoing it.

Evelyn Araluen, who won the Stella Prize for her poetry collection Dropbear, returns with her latest collection The Rot. The team are big fans with rave reviews, plus a reading of Change Agent by Evelyn.

In music, Ce recommends the new single by Pulp, a cover of Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around; and Sky looks back to Super Realm Park by Sleepmakeswaves ahead of the 15th birthday celebrations for Birds Robe.

And two excellent Australian exhibitions at Heide Museum.

Wicked: For Good has launched to a big opening weekend, taking in $226 million US in worldwide box office revenue, a substantial improvement on the already successful first film. But that makes it something of an outlier for Hollywood this year. Industry experts have pointed out that - accounting for inflation - the Summer tentpole season in the US had lower numbers than we’ve seen in decades.

Is this just an off year? Or the sign of a bigger problem for an industry already grappling with the rise of streaming and the after-effects of Covid? Scott Mendelson from The Outside Scoop explains what it all means.

And Peyton Reed, who has been part of the Marvel cinematic universe in recent years, is in Australia for the Brisbane International Film Festival, where he’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bring It On.

Our track of the week is Obscure Things by Will Hearn

Everyone in the world has come together in a single voice: shared perspective, shared understanding, shared goals - harmony. 

That's both the plot of Pluribus and a rough summary of how critics have reacted to the show. But Ce and Sky aren't entirely won over and share their concerns about the hive mind.

Wicked: For Good looks set to be one of the biggest releases of the year and, despite some structural challenges inherent to the musical, manages to stay propulsively fun, with some of the best costume and set design of the year and remarkable performances from the two leads and the full ensemble.

Ce's excited about Undead, a new album by Jessica O’Donoghue and Jack Symonds, which embraces contemporary Australian opera. And Sky shouts out Sharon Van Etten's 2025 album with The Attachment Theory, ahead of her Australian tour dates.

Plus: thoughts about the ARIAs, Last Samurai Standing, Sisu 2, and the latest exhibition at Buxton Contemporary.

Arts degrees are expected to cost $55,000 next year, but despite the rising cost to students, we’re seeing restructures, closures, and redundancies at one university after another. And the strain between the tertiary sector and the arts has been a consistent theme throughout 2025, with Meanjin, the Bendigo Writers Festival and MUMA all making headlines.

What’s gone wrong? What’s the impact for both universities and the arts? And is there a path back to better news? Distinguished Professor George Williams, vice-chancellor and president, Western Sydney University, and Professor Clare Wright, historian, author, and academic at La Trobe University share their perspectives.

Our track of the week is Watch Over Me by Bernard Fanning (feat Kasey Chambers & Clare Bowditch).

Rose Byrne puts in an award-winning performance as a woman under pressure in the excellent If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Glen Powell takes on an all-powerful media company in a dystopian future for the sake of his sick daughter in The Running Man. And Sergei Loznitsa returns to tragic flaws of the Stalin-era legal system in Two Prosecutors. Jason di Rosso from The Screen Show joins the team to talk through a film heavy week. 

In music, Ce gives a full-throated endorsement for Rosalia's Lux, which features collaborations with everyone from Björk and Yves Tumor to Caroline Shaw and the London Symphony Orchestra. And Sky is excited for both the new Mountain Goats album, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, and the release of one of the band's rarities, Moon Colony Bloodbath.

Plus the Australian Chamber Orchestra takes on Cocteau's Circle and Loznitsa's earlier documentary State Funeral on Mubi.

The Federal Government has announced plans for a local content quota for streaming video services in Australia. Any service with more than one million subscribers will be required to spend a percentage of their revenue on Australian content. Julianne Schultz and Guy Morrow take us through the details and consider whether the policy goes far enough.

And Hungarian-British author David Szalay has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his latest novel, Flesh. We speak with The Book Show's Sarah L’Estrange about the novel and hear some of her conversation with Szalay.

Our track of the week is Drawbacks by Dust

There’s a simple pleasure in seeing competent people doing their job well, which is one of the draws of The Diplomat, a show that follows in the tradition of the West Wing in balancing high stakes political drama with chaotic personal drama to great affect. As it enters season 3, and the chaos begins to overwhelm the competence, the team discuss whether it manages to keep meeting audience expectations.

Ce and Hannah Story head to Dangerously Modern at the Art Gallery of NSW and are thrilled at this exploration of Australian women artists who went to Europe to find their acclaim and brought modernism, surrealism, and cubism back home with them. (For more, check out the Dangerously Modern podcast by Radio National's Rosa Ellen)

Sky's enthusiastic about Jennifer Lawrence's performance in Die, My Love, but a little more muted about the film itself, and suggests that Predator: Badlands will appeal to action fans, even if some purists may take exception with the direction of the franchise.

And in music, Ce shares Feel It Change by Stella Donelly, and Sky pitches The Ladder by The Veils.