John Powers

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.

Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's film is about the adventures of a donkey, and his observations of modern life.

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.

Magie Murders is based on the bestselling novel by Anthony Horowitz, who, among other things, created the excellent World War II detective show Foyle's War. But where that earlier series was steeped in history, this lively new one is about the perils and pleasures of cleverness.

Made by box-office titan S.S. Rajamouli, RRR induces such unabashed giddiness in its audience that Hollywood is witnessing a push to get it nominated for the Oscars.

Critic at large John Powers reviews the third season of the acclaimed Hulu comedy-drama series, Ramy.