There’s nothing on the telly this Christmas.
There never is. But if, like me, you have trouble switching off from work but also enjoy being slumped in front of the box with a tub of Heroes (Quality Street are now banned in our house), I have good news.
I’ve picked out films and TV shows released this year that either have something to say about higher education, are set on campus and/or depict contemporary student life.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll shell out for a VPN, you’ll wonder why Disney thinks Nani should abandon her sister for college, and you’ll almost certainly switch off, which is what the break is for – eventually.
Other than the fantastic but final season of Big Boys, it really was slim pickings again this year from a UK perspective – which reminds us that whatever else the BBC, ITV and C4 are doing, it’s not higher education.
Before you take to the comments, I’ve not put in books or podcasts. I do enough reading in this job, and I edit ours, so my appetite for either is fairly thin – but do pop suggestions below if there are any.
You’re welcome – and apologies in advance if you’re at work over the next couple of weeks.
Julia Roberts heads to Yale (sort of – it’s actually filmed in Cambridge but set in New Haven) as a philosophy professor whose star student accuses her colleague of sexual misconduct. If you enjoyed the discomfort of Cate Blanchett in “Tár” but wished it had more Ivy League networking and dialogue about whether university should be a “safe space” or not, this is your Boxing Day sorted. Roberts delivers a line about education being meant to make you uncomfortable, not a “lukewarm bath”. Arif Ahmed will be thrilled.
Guillermo del Toro got his passion project made, and it’s a meditation on academic hubris. Oscar Isaac plays Victor as the ultimate postdoc gone wrong – brilliant, egotistical, and convinced his research will change the world. The university scenes feature actual professors listed in the credits, though they don’t seem to have undertaken that optional supervisor training. Jacob Elordi brings surprising depth to the Creature, who arguably just needed better student support services.
This documentary about the 1988 Gallaudet University protests is the year’s essential viewing for anyone who thinks student activism doesn’t achieve anything. Directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, it shows how four students shut down their campus and changed history, forcing the appointment of the university’s first deaf president. The board chair who supposedly said “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world” will have you chanting “Deaf Power!” from your sofa.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if someone tried to remake The Sopranos but set it in a Turkish university’s literature department, Bir Zamanlar İstanbul will be right up your street. Ali and Seher – a final-year Turkish Literature student and journalism student respectively – meet during a campus debate on whether crime is driven by society or personal choice, and the series quickly turns into a mafia thriller. It’s another one of those shows that casts 35-year-olds as undergraduates, but at least the debate scene offers a rare glimpse of Turkish academic culture before everyone starts shooting at each other. And just under the surface there’s some fascinating “western culture” v traditional Islamic values themes to get into too.
Where did all the campus high-jinks go? It’s sign of the time that so many titles on this list are bleak – this Spanish show follows 18-year-old Javi as he navigates university after personal tragedy, and shows students dealing with grief, anxiety, and the pressure to experience the perfect university experience. The six half-hour episodes are eminently bingeable and capture the forced intimacy that comes from being thrown together with strangers who you’re told will be friends for life, but in reality are barely friends for the whole of freshers.
Leo Woodall plays Edward Brooks, a Cambridge PhD student whose work on prime numbers could apparently unlock every computer in the world, which would be quite the REF impact if true. The eight-episode thriller sees him team up with an NSA agent after his supervisor dies under suspicious circumstances, and it’s very much The Imitation Game meets Good Will Hunting but with added paranoia about research security. Shot on location in Cambridge, critics moaned about its “uneven pacing” and “leaden dialogue,” which does suggest the writers have captured the authentic Cambridge tutorial experience.
French singer Nolwenn Leroy stars as Fanny, a biologist who returns to teach at the University of Rennes’s biological field station at Paimpont (fictionalised as the “University of Brocéliande”) twenty years after her best friend disappeared and she was the prime suspect. When history repeats itself with another disappearance, we get six episodes of Gallic noir. The series was shot entirely on location at the real university and in the mystical Brocéliande forest, giving us gorgeous establishing shots of campus buildings. It’s particularly refreshing to see academic staff portrayed as accomplished professionals rather than the usual depiction of hapless eccentrics, though the murder rate does suggest their risk assessments need work.
This is a reboot of the cult Russian sitcom “Univer” that brings five freshmen to Moscow State University’s legendary 510th dormitory block, where returning characters like rector Pavel Zuev try to make MVGU “the best university in the country”. The new students are proper Gen Z types who understand TikTok but not why they need to attend lectures, while dealing with the usual comedy of errors that comes from communal living. It’s basically Fresh Meat for the Soviet education system, and comes with the side plot dish of a wealthy student sponsor opening a dumpling restaurant on campus.
Muriel Robin plays Louise Arbus, a psycho-criminology professor who solves murders with the help of four carefully selected students. Now in its second full season with new episodes in 2025, it’s like How to Get Away with Murder but only with more wine and fewer actual murders. The students function as a kind of Greek chorus explaining criminology concepts while their professor employs what I’ll describe here as questionable methods. Lots of vintage Volkswagens to look at too.
It’s a Disney remake nobody wanted, but it puts Nani’s dilemma into policy reality. Her marine biology scholarship becomes the story of care work squeezing out opportunity. The ending has her heading off to university, while Lilo stays with Tūtū as her guardian. Higher education only looks like a choice when someone else is there to pick up the unpaid labour.
If you’ve been missing the “American discovers themselves at Oxbridge” genre since Saltburn, here’s Sofia Carson learning about poetry and terminal illness. Her performance has been universally panned as “stiff” – one reviewer called her and her co-star “beautiful looking puppets going through motions” – but the film does feature that hidden church in Amsterdam if you’re planning a European city break. The student-supervisor romance is romanticised in ways that feel quite dated these days, and the idea that American students would be treated like a novelty at Oxford suggests the writers have never visited.
The superhero university returns with our protagonists now framed as terrorists while the actual villain becomes dean. For me at least, it’s a fun satire of how university leaders someone chuck their own students under the bus. The handling of actor Chance Perdomo’s death (his character dies from the neurological toll of his powers) is genuinely moving, and the new villain Dean Cipher is basically every smooth talking university manager you’ve ever met, but with better hair.
Eva Victor off of TikTok makes her directorial debut with this fractured narrative about a professor dealing with trauma. Shot in Ipswich, Massachusetts, it’s been doing the festival circuit and dividing audiences who either find it “nuanced and brilliant” or “self-pitying mumblecore.” I just thought it was boring.
The final season of Jack Rooke’s masterpiece begins with the gang on holiday in Faliraki before returning to Brent Uni for their terrifying final year. It’s easily both the funniest and most devastating thing on television, dealing with Danny’s mental health crisis and Jack’s Princess Diana poetry with equal sincerity. If you don’t cry at the ending, you will need to check you still have a pulse. Jon Pointing deserves awards for his portrayal of male depression, and the show remains the gold standard for depicting that specific third-year feeling of everything ending before it’s begun.
Odessa A’zion (who’s apparently going to be massive) plays a scholarship student facing expulsion after her father’s death, who deals with it by pool-hopping through Chicago’s wealthy suburbs instead of attending her make-or-break meeting. It’s “The Breakfast Club” meets “Booksmart” meets class warfare, with a healthy dose of Malort (if you know, you know). The film captures the emptiness of a campus over the summer – no catering open and the wrong kind of quiet…
A French philosophy student navigates her Muslim faith, her emerging lesbian identity, and the commute between the Parisian banlieue and the Sorbonne. Based on Fatima Daas’s autobiographical novel, it’s been doing the festival circuit to acclaim, though reviews get it right when they say the pacing is “deliberately contemplative” (nothing happens for ages). Stick with it for some thoughtful A&P parallels – the university serves as both escape and alienation, a place where she can be herself but never quite belong.
Netflix threw a lot of money at this Japanese series about a college drummer recruited by the “Amadeus of Rock” for his new band. Takeru Satoh learned to actually sing and play guitar for the role, the campus (actually a private management uni in Tokyo) looks amazing and the music slaps. The romance subplot is however dire, not least because the male band members have better chemistry with each other than with the female lead.
Amazon’s take on the 2022 University of Idaho murders focuses on the victims rather than the killer (still on trial when released) – which is fine, but makes for an oddly unfinished documentary. The interviews with the Dean of Students show a management completely overwhelmed by the media circus, while the exploration of how TikTok sleuths made everything worse should be mandatory viewing for anyone teaching crisis communications.
George Clooney produced this documentary about decades of sexual abuse by team doctor Richard Strauss and the wrestling coaches who allegedly knew. It’s harrowing viewing – a real lesson in how institutional harbouring works – and multiple reviewers single out current congressman Jim Jordan’s alleged complicity, making this essential context for American politics watchers.
Season 2 of South Africa’s answer to “Euphoria” has more chaos in the Pantera residence. Four young women navigate koshuis culture, drug dealing to pay fees, and the casual trauma of South African university life. It’s dedicated to the late rapper Angie Oeh and features enough Afrikaans slang to make subtitles essential even for Dutch speakers. The show’s frank depiction of everything from abortion to assault has made it a massive hit on Showmax while horrifying conservative viewers, which is usually a good sign.
It’s a merger! Due to budget cuts, a university merges its engineering department with its modelling department, forcing computer science students to share space with fashion students. The protagonist, Ju Yeon San, is a brilliant coder who treats human emotion like buggy software that needs fixing. When campus celebrity Kang Min Hak – famous from a dating show but unable to operate a laptop – accidentally destroys her computer, he becomes the test subject for her new AI dating programme, LOVE.exe. A cautionary tale for those engaged in wedging modules together to create “interdisciplinary” programmes.
The Dutch have made a #MeToo university drama, focusing on a young lawyer forced to re-examine her “consensual” relationship with her thesis supervisor when he’s accused of abuse by current students. Based loosely on real University of Amsterdam scandals, it features a charismatic predator (Fedja van Huêt is terrifyingly good) and asks uncomfortable questions about power and consent.
Benito Skinner (of TikTok fame) created this series about a closeted freshman football player desperately trying to maintain his facade. Filmed in Toronto pretending to be America, featuring actors who are clearly 30 pretending to be 18, it nonetheless captures something real about the exhausting performance of identity that university demands. Reviews praise its “chaotic energy” and “intentionally unlikeable characters” – it certainly reminded me of those lads lads in the sports clubs that roam around in jackets.
A mockumentary that follows a struggling junior college cheerleading team in Oklahoma. Kristin Chenoweth plays an assistant coach with aggressively toxic positivity, while the rest of the cast nail a specific community college/clearing energy of “we’re all here because we couldn’t get in anywhere else.” Wholesome chaos.
Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut adapts the memoir of a competitive swimmer turned writer navigating trauma through a non-linear narrative. Jim Belushi plays Ken Kesey running a writing workshop, and reviews are divided between “visionary” and “pretentious,” with one critic comparing it to “watching someone’s therapy session through a kaleidoscope.” It took them 10 years to finish it, and it very much felt like a decade watching it.
A soapy “vertical” (watch it on your phone Grandad) mini-series that dives into the high-stakes, exclusionary world of elite university Greek Life. The plot follows a student at a top-tier university who becomes entangled in a volatile love triangle, struggling to balance a relationship with her boyfriend while maintaining a secret affair with a fraternity president. Starring K-Ledani, Amalie Vein, and Ellen Dadasyan, the show explores the social stratification of campus culture, where maintaining one’s reputation in the “elite social scene” often comes at the cost of personal integrity. Ideal for a hangover.
Fees! An Indonesian student accepts a polygamous marriage to fund her Korean study abroad dreams. It’s based on a hit novel and was the first Indonesian film shot on location in Korea, combining K-drama aesthetics with conservative Islamic values. The student finance crisis that drives the plot feels painfully real even if the solution doesn’t.
This documentary follows tech millionaire Bryan Johnson as he spends $2 million a year trying to reverse aging. The contrast between his son preparing for university naturally while Bryan frantically tries to reclaim his youth through supplements and plasma exchanges is weirdly poignant. Academics from Harvard and Birmingham pop up to point out the obvious flaws in his methodology while he ignores them, making this basically a film about the dangers of having too much money and not enough peer review.
Student protests
If you’re in the mood for student protest cinema, 2025 has a clutch. As Quatro Estações da Juventude (Four seasons of youth) spent a decade documenting Brazilian students fighting to keep their university funded while completing their degrees, creating an archive of a generation that refused to give up. Inner blooming springs captures Georgian students at Tbilisi State University moving between lecture halls and tear gas during the Foreign Agents law protests, with the director as part of the friend group being filmed, blurring the line between documentation and participation.
And Wake up, Serbia! gains exclusive access inside Belgrade’s University of Dramatic Arts during the student uprising, showing how the campus became the nerve centre of resistance against authoritarianism. All three refuse to romanticise protest – they show the exhaustion, the infighting, the way movements fragment when the cameras leave, and the specific courage required when your education becomes inseparable from your politics.
This Finnish documentary deserves more attention than it’s getting. An Australian neurodivergent man called Andrew Clutterbuck appears in Helsinki and somehow becomes the darling of Aalto University’s innovation ecosystem. They love him when he’s being disruptive and bringing that “entrepreneurial energy” that the strategic plan talks about. Then something tragic happens (the film’s coy about what), and suddenly Mr Innovation is yesterday’s news. Nine psychiatric diagnoses later, the “happiest country in the world” can’t find a bed for him.
And the rest
I’ve not had time to catch everything, obviously. Tiny Toons Looniversity finished with the characters getting degrees in “Toonery” from ACME Looniversity [insert Mickey Mouse degrees joke here]. Night of the dead sorority babes exists and features cannibal witches running a sorority and some nudity. There’s also Shutter, where past university crimes return as literal ghosts, The family plan 2, where Mark Wahlberg’s daughter studying in London kicks off an European heist (you’ll not be hankering for Family Plan 1), and College of the dead does exactly what it says on the tin.
Happy viewing, and if you’re struggling to stream any of these, HMU and I’ll put you in touch with Firestick Dave down the road from me 😉
