John Powers

Sundance TV's new six-part series centers on a family of high-billing divorce lawyers whose own private lives are as messy as the cases they're handling.

Rachel Kushner's new novel centers on a young mother serving two consecutive life sentences for murdering a man who'd been stalking her. Critic John Powers calls The Mars Room "searingly intelligent."

Near the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a big black monolith appears in an African desert, leaving a group of prehistoric ape-men standing there baffled. And that was pretty much the reaction that greeted the film itself when it premiered 50 years ago this week.