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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The superbly acted HBO series is a darkly funny riff on King Lear. Members of a family struggle for control of a media empire — and not one of them is likable, but all of them are fun.
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Acorn TV's new series follows a Scotland Yard team led by a detective whose wife has gone missing. London Killscombines the reassuring closure of a network cop series with a strong forward momentum.
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The six-part BBC series airing on HBO follows one British family over the course of 15 years of upheaval, beginning in 2019. The unsettling show imagines the dismal future that liberals fear. -
Meryl Streep joins the Big Little Liescast as the mother of the man killed at the end of Season 1 — complicating things for the Monterey Five, who are still processing the aftermath of the death. -
Olivia Wilde's lighthearted, female-centric film charts the adventures of two brainy best friends who embark on a quest to reframe their high school identities 24 hours before graduation.
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Phoebe Waller-Bridge pulls off the rare feat of taking a hugely successful show and making it much better. In Season 2, her character falls for a foul-mouthed Catholic priest. -
Everyone is either a fool, a knave or a monster in HBO's hilariously scabrous political satire starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. After seven seasons, Veepends its run with its sharp teeth fully intact.
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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.
