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 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. -
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.
