John Powers

The travails of immigrant life take a quietly beguiling form in Minari, a semi-autobiographical film by Lee Isaac Chung that brims with humor, humanity and hope.

The emergence of AIDS provides the impetus for It's a Sin, a hit British series about five young people who share a London apartment over the years from 1981 to '91.

John Powers says The Copenhagen Trilogy is a story about escape — escape from menial work, escape from traditional female roles, escape from boredom, escape from reality, and escape from the heavy weight of a self that was shaped in her childhood, a time, she writes, that's "long and narrow like a coffin."