John Powers

Rachel Kushner's new novel centers on a young mother serving two consecutive life sentences for murdering a man who'd been stalking her. Critic John Powers calls The Mars Room "searingly intelligent."

Near the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a big black monolith appears in an African desert, leaving a group of prehistoric ape-men standing there baffled. And that was pretty much the reaction that greeted the film itself when it premiered 50 years ago this week.

Hollinghurst's new domestic epic leapfrogs across seven decades to examine how the laws of social propriety shape the destinies of a father and son. Critic John Powers says the novel is fascinating.

Donald Glover's Emmy-winning FX series returns for its second season on Thursday. Critic John Powers says Atlanta is simultaneously "strange and angry and hysterically funny."

If you're a fan of thrillers, you know that they're defined by two extremes. At one end are the plot-driven worlds that work like clockwork machines (for instance, Murder on the Orient Express); at the other are the stories that sprawl outward to offer a portrait of the larger society (like James Ellroy's Los Angeles or Stieg Larsson's Sweden). As it turns out, I've recently come across an enjoyable example of each extreme.

The new season of the FX anthology series American Crime Story revisits the 1997 murder of the Italian designer. John Powers says the show presents a moving portrait of homophobia in 1990s America.

A talk with film critic John Powers about the movies coming out this holiday season.

John Powers has some gems he hasn't had a chance to review yet.

Film critic John Powers reviews About Schmidt starring Jack Nicholson.

There's an unforgettable scene in the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. Filmmaker Griffin Dunne asks Didion about the legendary moment when, while reporting a piece on the counter-culture in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, she came across a 5-year-old girl tripping on LSD.