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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Rather than rehash the 1980s superhero comic, series creator Damon Lindelof preserves the original's mood, themes and tricky structure — but uses them to tell an engrossing, totally new story on HBO.
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Attica Locke's new novel centers on a black Texas ranger's effort to find the vanished son of a white supremacist. Heaven, My Home offers an unsettling American spin on a complicated crime story.
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Inspired by an article in New York magazine, Hustlers is a giddy, energetic film about a band of New York strippers who start ripping off their rich, finance-world clients.
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A new film chronicles what happens when a Chinese billionaire reopens a former General Motors plant in Ohio. John Powers says it's an old-school observational documentary in the very best sense. -
Hatidze Muratova lives in a remote area of Macedonia and has one simple rule: When you harvest honey, you take half — and leave the other half for the bees. An elegant new documentary tells her story. -
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.
