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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In this wonderfully unpredictable film, first-time actor Park Ji-min stars as Freddie, a young woman raised by adoptive parents in France who returns to the country of her birth. -
The HBO series starring Matthew Rhys lures us in with the Perry Mason brand. But it ultimately overlooks the shark-like courtroom demeanor that made the character more legend than lawyer. -
The Oscar-nominated documentary follows two brothers in Delhi who run a homemade infirmary nursing black kites — birds of prey widely considered a scavenging nuisance — back to health. -
HBO's new show, which draws from a video game of the same name, is replete with apocalyptic landscapes and zombies. But what makes the series truly groundbreaking is the emotion that runs throughout.
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Based on an actual criminal case in France in which a Senegalese woman killed her baby daughter, Alice Diop's film is rigorous, powerful and crackling with ideas about isolation and colonialism. -
The 1985 novel has been described as "unfilmable." Baumbach wasn't deterred — and though the movie brims with terrific moments, his White Noise doesn't hold together as well as Don DeLillo's. -
Bill Nighy plays a bottled-up bureaucrat on a quest for meaning in Kazuo Ishiguro's adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film Ikiru. The first film felt inventive and urgent — Living doesn't live up. -
Every year, John Powers looks back on the great features he never got around to talking about. This year's list includes White Lotus, The Menu, Nanny and Dark Winds — plus one vodka commercial.
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Butler's 1979 book, Kindred, is now a series for FX on Hulu. In 1993, the pioneering author, who died in 2006, told Fresh Air she made up her own stories so that she could see herself in them.
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Jerzy Skolimowski's thrillingly imaginative new film, EO, follows a former circus donkey on a journey across modern Europe. It's a strange, haunting epic that couldn't feel more of our moment.
