John Powers

Midnight Diner" is a Japanese TV series about a diner located on a quiet side street in one of Tokyo's busiest districts. Although the show has been running on Netflix for several years, our critic-at-large, John Powers, keeps rewatching old episodes. He says the show creates a mood that keeps calling the viewer back.

In Naomi Hirahara's new novel a Japanese American family that had been interned during World War II returns home to a Los Angeles that isn't what they remembered.

The TV series "Dark Winds" is a cop show about the Navajo tribal police based on the bestselling novels by Tony Hillerman. The series begins its second season streaming on AMC+ today and then on Sunday on AMC. Our critic-at-large John Powers says that what makes the show work is less its crime story than its memorable characters.

German author Jenny Erpenbeck is one of the most acclaimed writers of the last 25 years. Her new novel "Kairos," just out from New Directions, tells the story of a 19-year-old female student in East Berlin who falls in love with a much older male writer in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Starring an excellent Shaun Evans, Endeavour is an origin story. It charts the pilgrim's progress of brilliant, headstrong Endeavour Morse as he goes from an idealistic young Oxford cop to the boozing, vaguely misanthropic detective made famous by Thaw.

Happy Valley, the BBC crime series that became an instant sensation when it premiered in 2014, is created by Sally Wainwright. It centers on a woman police sergeant in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire, it set the gold standard for crime series anchored by complicated women.

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.