John Powers
John Powers is the pop culture and critic-at-large on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He previously served for six years as the film critic.
Powers spent the last 25 years as a critic and columnist, first for LA Weekly, then Vogue. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Harper's BAZAAR, The Nation, Gourmet, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A former professor at Georgetown University, Powers is the author of Sore Winners, a study of American culture during President George W. Bush's administration. His latest book, WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai (co-written with Wong Kar Wai), is an April 2016 release by Rizzoli.
He lives in Pasadena, California, with his wife, filmmaker Sandi Tan.
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David Attenborough's Netflix series offers a strange waltz between wonder and melancholy. The show thrills us with the marvels of nature, and then saddens us that we are rapidly wiping them out.
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Over the years, the HBO series has risen from being a nifty potboiler to a timely expression of a zeitgeist that contests everything from gender roles to climate change to immigration.
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Ruth Wilson stars in the PBS drama based on the story of her own grandmother, who discovered, after 22 years of marriage, that her spy-turned-author husband may have been married to someone else. -
Written and directed by its star, Barbara Loden, Wandais based on the true story of a crime gone wrong. A restored version is now out from the Criterion Collection. -
A new British mini-series takes a murder that became a tabloid spectacle in the United Kingdom and transforms it into a deft primer on the unspectacular reality of police work. -
Lauren Wilkinson's sharp debut novel about a black woman living a double life as a spy spans three decades and leapfrogs from New York to the Caribbean to West Africa.
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Cold War'srichness comes from being steeped in detail. And it demonstrates what Everybody Knows does not: that the road to the universal begins with the specific. -
A new, eight-part Netflix series examines the complex aftermath of the 1994 killing spree — and offers a good reminder that history is vast, messy and ever-changing. -
Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the top strategist for Britain's "Leave" campaign in a new HBO film that offers a jaunty — if incomplete — take on the U.K.'s pending departure from the EU. -
Nicole Kidman gives an intense performance as a drunken, pointedly unlikable police officer in Karyn Kusama's new film. Critic John Powers says Destroyeris a flawed, but fascinating, noir thriller.
