John Powers

R.M.N. is based on an actual 2020 event in Ditrău, Romania, where 1,800 villagers voted to expel three Sri Lankans who worked at their local bakery.

A new eight-part TV series called "Drops Of God" is about a competition between a French woman and Japanese man to inherit the world's most valuable wine collection. The first two episodes of this multilingual show dropped Friday on Apple TV+. Our critic at large John Powers says that it's an engrossing tale that's as much about inheritance as wine.

A hugely timely new political thriller, and a fictional riff on the eco-sabotage manifesto by Andreas Malm.

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.

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.