John Powers

How to Blow Up A Pipeline is a lean, sleekly made movie about a modern-day monkey-wrench gang. Although unabashedly partisan, it doesn't preach or glamorize the eco-saboteurs.

In Raine Allen-Miller's high-spirited romcom, two young, Black Londoners spend a day walking and talking together. It's a rare and enjoyable on-screen journey through south-of-the-Thames London.

An FBI agent in a dead-end job suddenly finds himself in the middle of a huge conspiracy. This new 10-part series is a cross between a paranoid thriller from the '70s and a twisty TV show like 24.

Eleanor Catton's novel centers on young members of an radical environmental rights group who wind up entangled with a billionaire drone manufacturer. Our critic devoured all 400+ pages in two days.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Argentina, 1985 is a true-life portrait of a country struggling to reckon with its past. Decision to Leave is a thrillingly well-made murder story that crackles with originality.

A writer dies under suspicious circumstances, leaving the last chapter of his new mystery novel incomplete. PBS' new MASTERPIECE Mystery! series is based on the bestselling novel by Anthony Horowitz.

The epic action-picture bromance makes the case for returning to theaters — it reminds us that movies are always more thrilling when they're part of a collective experience.

Ramy Youssef's comic-drama about Muslim life in America aims higher than almost anything else on TV. In its new season, Ramy grows increasingly unlikable and his family appears to be falling apart.

There's nothing mythic about this series, which acts as a sequel to Paul Schrader's hit 1980 movie. This American Gigolo relies too much on people caring about a film that was made four decades ago.

Set in 1989 Germany shortly before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this series centers on a cocky female assassin and puts a playful spin on the end of communism.