Metropolitan Mixtape: November 2025

Diplomats, gangsters, monsters and the Christmas playlist

The Diplomat (2023—)

Tobias Sturt

: For those of you who enjoy The West Wing, we recommend The Diplomat if you haven’t yet discovered it. Created by Debora Cahn, who began her writing career on The West Wing, The Diplomat is the story of a career American diplomat, Kate Wyler, who is appointed ambassador to Britain in the wake of a terrorist attack on a Royal Navy aircraft carrier in the Gulf.

The Diplomat is a good deal pulpier than The West Wing, and it’s more of a thriller than a political drama. Indeed, it contains a lot of elements that usually make me hate a show: the constant escalation of plots with increasingly bizarre developments, storylines that only ever involve the same five people we met in episode one, regular revelations of the kind usually associated with soap characters. But I loved it. We have binged it intemperately and now have nothing to watch.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I loved so much. To start with, many of the performances are great: Ali Ahn is splendidly dry as CIA station chief Eidra Park, and Rory Kinnear is having a whale of a time as an unhinged British PM, a sort of hideous Boris Johnson/David Cameron hybrid. We also get the onscreen reunion of Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford, and it’s a treat.

But what blows me away is the details. A beautiful degree of thought has gone into researching exactly the right class markers for high-ranking Americans living in London: in one scene, Eidra eats a Sainsbury’s ‘Taste the Difference’ takeaway salad while drinking from a Le Creuset mug. Almost uniquely, this is an American-made show that acknowledges there’s more to London than Westminster Bridge and the Brompton Road, and exterior shots are almost always geographically accurate. This sense of care extends through the whole production.

All three seasons so far have been driven by the spiralling fallout of a single inciting incident, the attack on the British carrier. Sure, that fallout becomes increasingly ludicrous; but each twist is taken seriously. The politics are developed believably; the intelligence and personalities of the characters are consistent. It also, I suspect, captures a fundamental truth of politics: that there is no ‘solution’, no right answer. Instead, there is just a constant scrabbling to keep everything together, like Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993) desperately laying down train tracks in the path of onrushing events, dear boy, events.

Strange New Worlds, Season 3 (2023)

Tobias Sturt

: Quiff, the final front hair. Speaking of ludicrous but wonderful, Captain Pike and The Enterprise are back for some further boldly going. For the Star Trek-agnostic (barbarians), this is a prequel to the original series, although the Enterprise is increasingly full with classic characters. It’s had a young Spock, Uhura and Chapel since the beginning, but we’ve now picked up a young Scotty, and a young Kirk keeps popping in to practise his idiosyncratic empha… sis.

Each version of Star Trek is a reflection of its time. The original ‘60s series is full of Kennedy-era American gung-ho; the ‘90s Next Generation is endless committee meetings and corporate empathy. Strange New Worlds is… silly. Delightfully so, I should point out, and not without an accompanying darkness. Most of the characters are dealing with some kind of trauma from their pasts, and we already know from the original series that Pike himself is heading for a grisly end. But the show insists on dancing, sometimes literally, in the face of certain doom, which is rather like watching a fantastical sci-fi adventure in today’s political climate. Anyway, it is at least absolutely doing what I’m here for, upholding that central Star Trek tenet: that if we learn to work together, we might just make it through.

Letterboxd Diary

Tobias Sturt

: I complained in the last Mixtape about how I’d seen all the classic Universal monster movies (often multiple times) and now had nothing to watch for Halloween. But then I remembered that people keep remaking those classics, including some of the most inventive film-makers currently working. And since that Mixtape came out well before Halloween, I was able to have a lovely seasonal mash with the monsters.

The Skull (1965)

A rather silly Amicus horror in which the skull of the Marquis de Sade is haunted and causes whoever owns it to become a murderer. It’s basically a ‘60s-set story about the seedy purveyors of esoteric artefacts and amateur occultist collectors (Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, what a delight!). It put me in mind of a Charles Williams novel: dark magic in a mid-century setting. The last half hour, as the skull drives Peter Cushing’s mild-mannered antiquary homicidally insane, is almost entirely without dialogue. It’s just pure visual storytelling, with the skull floating menacingly around and Cushing acting his little socks off, all beautifully photographed. After all, director Freddie Francis did also work as a cinematographer, on, for example, The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984).

Frankenstein (2025)

Speaking of silly but beautiful, here’s Guillermo del Toro’s version of Mary Shelley’s foundational gothic horror. Everyone always exclaims in wonder that it was written by a 19 year old, but by god you can tell. This is compounded by the fact that dialogue is not del Toro’s strong suit: at one point his brother even tells Frankenstein ‘You are the monster’. But while del Toro might be a little too faithful to Shelley’s dense early-nineteenth-century prose, he perfectly captures her hallucinatory gothic vision. It is a wonderfully designed and directed film. And wonderfully cast, too; finally, someone’s found a good use for Jacob Elordi.

Nosferatu (2025)

Very much not Dracula, legally speaking, because F. W. Murna — the director of the 1922 original — didn’t properly license Bram Stoker’s novel, and the film was supposed to be destroyed following legal action by Stoker’s widow. Fortunately not every copy was, which is how Robert Eggers has come to remake it. He captures that sense in the original of a vampire as a force of disease, of physical corruption, rather than the sexual and moral corruption of Dracula (1897) and of so many subsequent adaptations. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) would make a particularly lush and romantic comparison to this shadowy, skin-crawling film. I think I might even prefer it to Werner Herzog’s chilly 1979 remake.

The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025)

I was slightly worried that this was going to be an awkward and squirm-inducing comedy of embarrassment, but it’s not. It is awkward, but not unbearably, and it’s largely cosy and unthreatening. You do have to slightly recalibrate yourself when you realise that it’s not about the lost romance between the two musicians, but instead is about the burgeoning bromance between the musician and his slightly weird fan. But then, I’ve been a slightly weird fan of Tim Key and Tom Basden since their excellent late-00s sketch show Cowards, so that was fine with me.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Speaking of something that should have been awkward and squirmy and absolutely wasn’t: I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard at a film in years. It also has a deep layer of sadness, and a jaundiced view of modern corporate life, EU expansion, and the cultural and economic gaps between different parts of the continent. (It’s a particularly European film, with its own idiosyncratic rhythms and interests; the rumoured remake starring Jack Nicholson and Kirsten Wiig sounds like the ravings of a madman, impossible and stupid.) Most of all, Toni Erdmann is about a relationship between a tightly wound, high achieving daughter and her lunatic father, played by the always extraordinary Sandra Hüller and the excellent Peter Simonischek. There are some quite stunning moments in which Hüller appears to do nothing, and yet you can watch an entire series of emotions cross her mind. It really is a masterclass in film acting, from both of them. A terrific, idiosyncratic and hysterical movie. Straight into the Letterboxd Favourites, this one.

The Irishman (2019)

Rowan Davies

: In an inversion of our usual form, I made Toby write about The Diplomat because I wanted to write about the Scorsese film.

It’s possible that, like us, you’ve been avoiding watching The Irishman because a) it’s three-and-a-half hours long (!!), b) it’s yet another gangster film, and c) it uses ‘de-ageing technology’ to allow Robert De Niro (76 when it was released), Joe Pesci (also 76) and Al Pacino (79) to play men in their 30s and 40s. Taken together, this was not — for me at least — an appetising proposition, but I was eventually drawn in by the premise; The Irishman is adapted from the memoir of a man who claimed to have killed notorious US union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

So, does it work? Well…

The ‘de-ageing technology’ is creepy as hell (everyone looks like Tom Hanks in The Polar Express), and is also a failure in its own terms, because the de-aged De Niro is not, at all, a plausible approximation of a 40-year-old. Even without the weird facial denaturing, he has the voice of a 76-year-old, the gait of a 76-year-old, the energy of a 76-year-old. Ageing is a whole-body process.

The film is also incredibly slow and plodding. At times it’s outright monotonous, so that you think ‘Marty, you could just have cut that entire scene.’ There are sequences that recall the famous tracking shot in the restaurant in Goodfellas, but they are less glamorous and overwhelming. There are scenes that riff on the ‘take the gun, leave the cannoli’ vaudeville from The Godfather, except that they’re not funny. The Irishman feels like something that has gone to seed: flabby and slack, pushing at the seams of its leather blouson jacket.

There are two possible explanations for a film with these flaws making it to the screen. The first is that Martin Scorsese has suddenly lost the use of his faculties and all his five senses. The second is that he’s doing this deliberately. And if he’s doing it deliberately — and I think you have to give him that much credit — the whole things becomes a cinematic portrait of Dorian Gray, a revelation of moral and literal corruption.

I think, in The Irishman, Scorsese is atoning for Goodfellas, a film that made the life of a mafia thug look so beautiful, so exciting and compelling and urgent and funny and narratively perfect. Don’t get me wrong: I love Goodfellas. But there’s no getting away from its moral glibness, the way it covers violence with a dusting of starlight and refuses to properly contextualise the depravity and narcissism. The way it makes shooting people in the head look real fuckin sexy, like Elliot Gould and Grover.

In The Irishman, Scorsese is saying: you know what? Not only are mafia hoods evil; they’re also boring. They wade slowly through life. They bump into furniture; they’re slow on the uptake; they look bad in their suits. Their much-vaunted social culture is thin and tedious. And the soundtrack consists of whatever happens to be playing on the radio at the time. I think Scorsese knows very well that nothing about the de-ageing technology works, but using these actors — so much less energetic and attractive than they were in their prime, and encumbered with an uncanny, awkward visual effect — is a stunningly effective way to dramatise the corruption of a culture these men once did so much to glamourise.

Playlist

Tobias Sturt

: Traditionally, the November playlist is a Christmas one (by which I mean, it was last year and I intend to keep doing this indefinitely). I was going to make this a list of sad Christmas songs as a sop to those Scrooges who hate the season (or, more specifically, hate the genre), but then a narrative arc started developing and I couldn’t help myself. The playlists are all on Spotify.

Blue Christmas - Elvis Presley. We’ve already talked a lot about Elvis this month, so it seemed only right to kick off with him.

Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me) - Eleanor Friedberger. More Elvis but reinterpreted by Eleanor Friedberger sometime of The Fiery Furnaces.

Some Hearts at Christmas Time - Low. You’ve got to have Low at Christmas. We had the classic ‘Just Like Christmas’ last year so here’s an alternative.

Hard Candy Christmas - Dolly Parton. There’s a bright ache in Dolly’s voice that just perfectly sells this song of seasonal blues.

Just Me This Year - Rachael & Vilray. But then does the season need to be blue? It could be cheerfully jazzy instead.

Last Christmas - Lucy Dacus. Are you playing Whamageddon? Good news: you can stop worrying about that now, thanks to Lucy Dacus.

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? - Nancy Wilson. There are certain genres that are perfectly suited to Christmas music: brass bands, obviously; amateur choirs; foot stomping Glam. But mid-century jazz might be the cosiest.

All I Want for Christmas Is You - Carla Thomas. Or maybe its mid-century soul.

I Don’t Intend to Spend Christmas Without You - Margo Guryan. We’re starting to get a little more hopeful now, thanks to this lovely little slice of ‘60s pop.

I’ll Be Home For Christmas (If Only In My Dreams) - Frank Sinatra. Maybe it’ll be alright, after all, thanks to Frank.

You can also find this playlist on Spotify:

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If it’s almost December, it’s almost time for this year’s Christmas Story. Here’s a sneak preview from The Metropolitan’s seasonal sister Substack:

The Wish List: Sneak preview