John Powers

If you're a fan of thrillers, you know that they're defined by two extremes. At one end are the plot-driven worlds that work like clockwork machines (for instance, Murder on the Orient Express); at the other are the stories that sprawl outward to offer a portrait of the larger society (like James Ellroy's Los Angeles or Stieg Larsson's Sweden). As it turns out, I've recently come across an enjoyable example of each extreme.

The new season of the FX anthology series American Crime Story revisits the 1997 murder of the Italian designer. John Powers says the show presents a moving portrait of homophobia in 1990s America.

John Powers has some gems he hasn't had a chance to review yet.

Film critic John Powers reviews About Schmidt starring Jack Nicholson.

There's an unforgettable scene in the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. Filmmaker Griffin Dunne asks Didion about the legendary moment when, while reporting a piece on the counter-culture in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, she came across a 5-year-old girl tripping on LSD.

Maya Jasanoff weaves together biography, history, literature and her own travels in a new book about the globe-trotting author. Reviewer John Powers says Jasanoff's portrait of Conrad is terrific.

The eight stories in Carmen Maria Machado's new collection feature women in extremis — physical danger, psychological meltdown, treacherous love or close encounters of a ghostly kind.

Emma Stone stars as King in a breezy new film that carries us back to '73, and the heyday of the women's lib movement. Critic John Powers says the message of Battle of the Sexes still resonates today.

The TV series' second season takes place four years after its first, and begins with an unknown Asian woman's body washing up (in a suitcase) on a beach near Sydney.

The 1950 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame was adapted from a lesser-known 1947 novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, who belongs in the crime-writing pantheon. The novel's just been re-released.