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John Powers

Tomatometer-approved critic

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Misery (1990) 87% EDIT “Misery zips right along, propelled by its queasy, cruel humor, and by its two fine stars.” – L.A. Weekly Jan 22, 2026 Full Review Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) 91% EDIT “In the end, what's scariest about this movie isn't the T-1000 or the evocation of nuclear holocaust - it's that even Cameron's most violent excesses are a helluva lot of fun to watch. ” – L.A. Weekly Dec 8, 2025 Full Review The Secret Agent (2025) 98% EDIT “This smart, brutal, often funny thriller uses the travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency.” – NPR Dec 6, 2025 Full Review Predator 2 (1990) 36% EDIT “You will look in vain for Arnold Schwarzenegger... You will look in vain for many things.” – L.A. Weekly Oct 31, 2025 Full Review The Mastermind (2025) 90% EDIT “Where many male directors might find this heroic, Reichardt finds it deluded and often comical. She can spot a narcissist at a hundred yards.” – NPR Oct 30, 2025 Full Review Blue Moon (2025) 91% EDIT “Linklater understands how to use his camera in confined spaces to keep a talkie movie visually arresting. And he's helped by the snap of Robert Kaplow's screenplay and by an immaculate cast that nails every line.” – NPR Oct 21, 2025 Full Review A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE (2025) 75% EDIT “While all of this is unnerving, it's also thrilling to watch. Bigelow directs with a maestro's lucid precision, perfectly orchestrating the complicated shifts from person to person, time frame to time frame.” – NPR Oct 14, 2025 Full Review My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) 95% EDIT “This movie is about what movies should be about. It's about politics and screwing, fighting and making money, guilt and love and anger; it's about the juice and blood that make life worthwhile. ” – L.A. Weekly Oct 10, 2025 Full Review The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) 88% EDIT “There's so much hilarious stuff here that you forgive the movie its dullish patches.” – L.A. Weekly Jul 24, 2025 Full Review Cloud (2024) 93% EDIT “A master of existential dread, Kurosawa was early to posit a creepy side to online culture... Things have gotten even grimmer in Cloud. The malevolence is not supernatural but human.” – NPR Jul 18, 2025 Full Review Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025) 80% EDIT “Predictably, this new movie is overblown, inanely plotted, clotted with expository dialogue and boundlessly self-congratulatory. But, you know, it's also fun to watch. ” – NPR Jun 4, 2025 Full Review Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2024) 82% EDIT “The risk in explicitly evoking Austen is that it instantly raises our standards. And sadly, Piani can't match her model's clarity or élan. Her movie is tamer and more sentimental, and utterly unconcerned with society.” – NPR Jun 3, 2025 Full Review Flow (2024) 97% EDIT “The fluidity of life runs through Flow, a marvelous animated movie from Latvia.” – NPR Mar 1, 2025 Full Review I'm Still Here (2024) 97% EDIT “It's one measure of Latin America's arduous history that it has spawned so many books and movies about dictatorship... What they share is the awareness that history hurts. Few films have shown this with more delicate intelligence than I'm Still Here.” – NPR Feb 11, 2025 Full Review Babygirl (2024) 76% EDIT “Babygirl's problem is not Romy's desire to be dominated. It's making her erotic liberation so triumphant that the story's sexual politics don't matter.” – NPR Jan 8, 2025 Full Review Emilia Pérez (2024) 71% EDIT “Although Saldana has never been better, the movie finally belongs to Gascon. Knowing this story from the inside, she gives Emilia and the yearning Manitas a gravity and conflicted complexity the story doesn't always earn.” – NPR Nov 13, 2024 Full Review A Real Pain (2024) 96% EDIT “Eisenberg uses this cockeyed version of a road movie to tell a funny, moving, casually profound story about family, friendship, the weight of the Jewish past, the weight of everyone’s past and the different ways one deals with suffering.” – NPR Oct 30, 2024 Full Review Wolfs (2024) 66% EDIT “Clooney and Pitt are such deft, charismatic actors that, even in a lazy, low-key picture like this one, you get a lot of pleasure from their barbed asides and mocking silences. It’s clear why they’ve been stars for three decades.” – NPR Oct 4, 2024 Full Review Saving Casa Bonita (2024) 100% EDIT “The movie’s a treat, weaving together great archival footage, excerpts from South Park and Elvis’ movie Fun in Acapulco, plus countless scenes of Parker and Stone’s amused horror.” – NPR Sep 16, 2024 Full Review Bright Lights, Big City (1988) 59% EDIT “For despite its glitzy subject matter, the story is utterly conventional. ” – L.A. Weekly Aug 21, 2024 Full Review Beetlejuice (1988) 83% EDIT “Here [Burton] encourages Michael Keaton to strut his stuff, and this crack comic actor gives Beetlejuice the kind of quicksilver lift that can only come from actors, never from effects. ” – L.A. Weekly Aug 21, 2024 Full Review The Instigators (2024) 41% EDIT “Back in the 1970s, The Instigators would probably have been the second or third best movie coming out on any given week. In 2024, it’s Hollywood’s best movie this month, at least for viewers who don’t marvel at Marvel.” – NPR Aug 9, 2024 Full Review Aliens (1986) 94% EDIT “A noisy, hectoring, mechanical piece of filmmaking. It beats you like a drum, but there's no resonance.” – L.A. Weekly Jul 30, 2024 Full Review Twisters (2024) 75% EDIT “[Powell is] a confident actor who seems to think there’s an Academy Award for Smugness. That’s not a swipe, at least not completely. Carrying himself like a movie star in a world of extras, he boasts the energy and charisma to make the love story work.” – NPR Jul 19, 2024 Full Review Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara (2023) 86% EDIT “Now, at moments Kidnapped feels old-fashioned. Yet Bellocchio never falls into boring costume drama realism. Working in a painterly style, he pushes things toward the operatic.” – NPR May 31, 2024 Full Review
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