John Powers

Critic at large John Powers reviews a debut spy novel about an African American female FBI agent during the Cold War.

Asghar Farhadi, the gifted Iranian filmmaker who in recent years has won foreign film Oscars for both A Separation and The Salesman, told The New York Times in January, "The taste of love and the taste of hate are everywhere the same." That belief in universality gets put to the test in Farhadi's latest film, Everybody Knows, a tale of love and crime that finds him working for the first time in Spain with a cast of Spanish-speaking stars.

John Powers reviews 'Black Earth Rising' a new Netflix series about a Rwandan exile and an American human rights lawyer who investigate war crimes committed during and after the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Critic at large John Powers reviews the new HBO movie 'Brexit' which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the top strategist for Britian's "Leave" campaign.

Nicole Kidman gives an intense performance as a drunken, pointedly unlikable police officer in Karyn Kusama's new film. Critic John Powers says Destroyer is a flawed, but fascinating, noir thriller.

Critic-at-large John Powers tells us about the TV shows, films, and books he didn't get to earlier this year, but wishes he had.

Ever since I was young, I've loved stories set in the far-flung reaches of the West's many empires — from the British Raj of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India to the surreal Vietnam of Apocalypse Now. And I still love them, though I now realize that they usually look at other cultures from the vantage point of outsiders, even intruders.

John Powers reviews two new series based on true crime stories. Dannemora dramatizes the story of a 2015 prison break. Dirty John follows the delusions and dangers of a woman falling for a conman.

John Powers reviews the BBC show 'Bodyguard,' which was a hit in the UK. It premieres on Netflex this week and tells the story of a war-traumatized police bodyguard who's assigned to look after an ambitious woman politician who may be a terrorist target.

On July 22, 2011, a Norwegian right-winger named Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people, most of them teenagers, leaving hundreds more wounded. A new film tells the story. John Powers has a review.