John Powers

First the town disappears from Google Maps. Then a UFO appears — and a water truck is riddled with bullet holes. Bacurau is a community portrait, a horror thriller and a work of political filmmaking.

A jaunty new 10-part series plays as an amped-up comic book, blending an old-school revenge saga with a grim history lesson. Hunters exhibits a desire to be inventive that doesn't always pay off.

A Tokyo police detective heads to London to bring back his gangster brother in this BBC series, which is playing on Netflix. Giri/Haji is a thriller that bursts with compelling scenes.

Fellini was cinema's great laureate of the id, a director who understood the power of the body and didn't fear its unruliness.

A 10-part series based on the 2018 novel centers on the murder of a young boy — then spirals out to draw connections between our inner demons and the ones roaming out in the world.

Few things haunt a critic more than loving something and not being able to share it. This year, Fresh Air critic John Powers circles back to Unbelievable, Atlantics, Where the Light Falls and more.

Writer-director Céline Sciamma's gorgeous new costume drama centers on the relationship between a young female artist and the woman she's been commissioned to secretly paint.

The new season of the Netflix's wonderfully entertaining historical soap opera carries Queen Elizabeth II's story into the mid-1960s and '70s, when Britain's post-war afterglow has faded.

John Krasinski stars as a more righteous than lovable ex-marine working as a financial analyst for the CIA. Season 2's plot line seems to have been ripped from (a casual glance at) the headlines.

Rather than rehash the 1980s superhero comic, series creator Damon Lindelof preserves the original's mood, themes and tricky structure — but uses them to tell an engrossing, totally new story on HBO.

Attica Locke's new novel centers on a black Texas ranger's effort to find the vanished son of a white supremacist. Heaven, My Home offers an unsettling American spin on a complicated crime story.

Inspired by an article in New York magazine, Hustlers is a giddy, energetic film about a band of New York strippers who start ripping off their rich, finance-world clients.

A new film chronicles what happens when a Chinese billionaire reopens a former General Motors plant in Ohio. John Powers says it's an old-school observational documentary in the very best sense.

Hatidze Muratova lives in a remote area of Macedonia and has one simple rule: When you harvest honey, you take half — and leave the other half for the bees. An elegant new documentary tells her story.

The superbly acted HBO series is a darkly funny riff on King Lear. Members of a family struggle for control of a media empire — and not one of them is likable, but all of them are fun.

Acorn TV's new series follows a Scotland Yard team led by a detective whose wife has gone missing. London Kills combines the reassuring closure of a network cop series with a strong forward momentum.

The six-part BBC series airing on HBO follows one British family over the course of 15 years of upheaval, beginning in 2019. The unsettling show imagines the dismal future that liberals fear.

Meryl Streep joins the Big Little Lies cast as the mother of the man killed at the end of Season 1 — complicating things for the Monterey Five, who are still processing the aftermath of the death.

Olivia Wilde's lighthearted, female-centric film charts the adventures of two brainy best friends who embark on a quest to reframe their high school identities 24 hours before graduation.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge pulls off the rare feat of taking a hugely successful show and making it much better. In Season 2, her character falls for a foul-mouthed Catholic priest.