Author Spotlight

John Powers

John Powers has been the film critic for LA Weekly, Vogue, and NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where he is presently critic at large. He’s the cowriter (with Wong Kar Wai) of the 2016 book WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai.

6 Results
Blossoms Shanghai: An Introduction

Beginning on November 24, the Criterion Channel will exclusively premiere the long-awaited television series from visionary director Wong Kar Wai.

By John Powers

World of Wong Kar Wai: Like the Most Beautiful Times

By marrying the glamour of golden-age Hollywood to a quicksilver formal daring influenced by a wide range of artists, the Hong Kong auteur became one of the coolest and most beloved filmmakers in the world in the 1990s.

By John Powers

On Jules and Jim
When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succ…

By John Powers

Identification of a Woman: The Women in the Window
“For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” says the narrator of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. “It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of those worked ston…

By John Powers

Salò
On November 2, 1975, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was found dead—murdered, police said, by a young male prostitute. However lurid its details (the Roman tabloids ran huge front-page photos of the disfigured corpse), his death struck man…

By John Powers

Breathless

Since its first screening in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s astonishing debut has lost none of its power to thrill an audience or change the way we see the world.

By John Powers