John Powers

Nicole Kidman gives an intense performance as a drunken, pointedly unlikable police officer in Karyn Kusama's new film. Critic John Powers says Destroyer is a flawed, but fascinating, noir thriller.

Critic-at-large John Powers tells us about the TV shows, films, and books he didn't get to earlier this year, but wishes he had.

Ever since I was young, I've loved stories set in the far-flung reaches of the West's many empires — from the British Raj of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India to the surreal Vietnam of Apocalypse Now. And I still love them, though I now realize that they usually look at other cultures from the vantage point of outsiders, even intruders.