John Powers

Todd Haynes' inventive, immersive movie is full of interesting ideas. The Velvet Underground neatly sidesteps the usual rock-doc banalities as it plunges us into the Velvets and their world.

Two new films grapple with the complexity of moral courage. Wife of a Spy is set in Japan on the cusp of WWII. Azor follows a Swiss banker during the Argentine dictatorship of the 1980s.

The tension never lets up in this four-part PBS Masterpiece series. As two brothers scramble to cover up their crime, Guilt practically echoes with the sounds of other shoes dropping.

No fewer than five assassins are on the high speed train at the center of Kotaro Isaka outlandish and virtuoso novel — and within pages, they're going after each other.

William Gardner Smith wrote the story of a Black writer who, like Smith himself, moved to Paris to pursue a freedom he couldn't find in America. New York Review Books is releasing a new edition.

The latest season of the British police series on PBS Masterpiece is twistily plotted and suffused with sadness. Unforgotten packs much more of an emotional punch than your ordinary cop show.

Joshua Cohen offers a fictionalized version of a real-life campus visit by the father of the former Israeli prime minister. The novel offers a funny take on serious things.

Omar Sy plays a shapeshifting thief in the Netflix series modeled on Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin novels. The new season offers a winning confection of speed, cool settings and good acting.

Acorn TV's engaging new crime drama takes place in a touristy seaside town with an oversized murder rate. Pearl, the single mom who runs the seafood restaurant, also has a small detective agency.

A writer offers up her guest house to a famous painter in hope that something transcendent will happen. But he's selfish, amoral and flagrantly misogynistic — and monstrously at ease with all this.

The first volume of Kaoru Takamura's 1997 eccentric crime thriller has just been translated into English. Inspired by a real-life case, Lady Joker reveals its world in rich, polyphonic detail.

The Man Who Sold His Skin centers on a Syrian man who, desperate to reach Belgium, allows an artist to tattoo a visa on his back. The film has been nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar.

Four middle-aged high school teachers test the theory that life is better with a constant infusion of alcohol. It's a provocative premise that wraps up in an exuberantly Hollywood ending.

This four-part TV series isn't merely unfolding a crime story —it offers a metaphor for the troubled soul of Northern Ireland, two decades after the Troubles supposedly ended.

Mick Herron's brilliantly plotted series follows a group of maladroit MI5 agents who've somehow blown it with the agency. The latest installment is a timely novel set in a post-Brexit U.K.

Lee Isaac Chung's semi-autobiographical film centers on a South Korean family trying to make it as farmers in rural Arkansas. Minari proves that a small story can feel bigger than a blockbuster.

As with COVID-19, AIDS had its deniers and its conspiracy theorists. A new five-part series centers on five young adults sharing an apartment in London at the onset of that epidemic.

Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen took her own life in 1976. A newly translated version of her three-part memoir traces the sometimes amusing, sometimes painful turns of her unconventional life.

Corpses pile up, but there are no human footsteps surrounding the dead bodies — only animal footprints. This strange, darkly funny film mixes feminism, social justice and ecology.

Eley Williams tells the story of two word-mad characters who work for the same dictionary publisher 120 years apart. This novel is perfect for anyone who loves puns, crosswords and witty writing.