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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A Tokyo police detective heads to London to bring back his gangster brother in this BBC series, which is playing on Netflix. Giri/Haji is a thriller that bursts with compelling scenes.
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Fellini was cinema's great laureate of the id, a director who understood the power of the body and didn't fear its unruliness. -
A 10-part series based on the 2018 novel centers on the murder of a young boy — then spirals out to draw connections between our inner demons and the ones roaming out in the world. -
Few things haunt a critic more than loving something and not being able to share it. This year, Fresh Air critic John Powers circles back to Unbelievable, Atlantics, Where the Light Falls and more. -
Writer-director Céline Sciamma's gorgeous new costume drama centers on the relationship between a young female artist and the woman she's been commissioned to secretly paint.
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The new season of the Netflix's wonderfully entertaining historical soap opera carries Queen Elizabeth II's story into the mid-1960s and '70s, when Britain's post-war afterglow has faded.
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John Krasinski stars as a more righteous than lovable ex-marine working as a financial analyst for the CIA. Season 2's plot line seems to have been ripped from (a casual glance at) the headlines. -
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.
