John Powers

Birnam Wood is a whooshingly enjoyable new novel by Eleanor Catton, a New Zealander whose previous book, The Luminaries, made her, at 28, still the youngest person ever to win the Booker Prize.

John Powers says the movie starts off like a sentimental fish-out-of-water story about a young woman's search for her roots. But it quickly becomes clear that we're seeing something stranger and stronger.

Perry Mason, best known to most Americans as the unbeatable defense attorney played on TV with glowering self-assurance by Raymond Burr. When HBO's first installment of its Perry Mason reboot came out in 2020, it replaced this triumphalist hero with a scuffed-up Perry whose origin story bore all the hallmarks of today's prestige TV, from its embrace of long-form storytelling to a pricey, production-designed evocation of 1930s Los Angeles.

This inspiring film takes us inside the lives of two ordinary seeming Muslim brothers in Delhi who are actually extraordinary in their dedication to doing good in a city teetering on the edge of apocalypse.

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.

Saint Omer is the strikingly confident feature debut of Alice Diop, a 43-year-old French filmmaker born of Senegalese immigrants.

The new Netflix film White Noise, IS the latest film from Noah Baumbach, best known for movies like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story. The movie is adapted from Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, a cool, dazzling book shot through with so many shifting ironies that virtually every reviewer has described it as unfilmable.

Living, is a sleekly sentimental new British drama adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro from Akira Kurosawa's classic 1952 film Ikiru, which means "to live" in Japanese. Starring the great Bill Nighy, it tells the story of a bottled-up bureaucrat in 1950s London who's led to examine the way he's spent the last 30 years of his life.

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.

In her most popular novel, the 1979 "Kindred," she put a searing spin on the time travel story, shuttling her heroine back and forth between 1970s la and a pre-Civil War plantation. The book has now been turned into an ambitious new FX series by another MacArthur fellow, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who gives Butler's tale a twirl of his own.