Mark Jenkins
Mark Jenkins reviews movies for NPR.org, as well as for , which covers the Washington, D.C., film scene with an emphasis on art, foreign and repertory cinema.
Jenkins spent most of his career in the industry once known as newspapers, working as an editor, writer, art director, graphic artist and circulation director, among other things, for various papers that are now dead or close to it.
He covers popular and semi-popular music for The Washington Post, Blurt, Time Out New York, and the newsmagazine show Metro Connection, which airs on member station -FM.
Jenkins is co-author, with Mark Andersen, of Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital. At one time or another, he has written about music for Rolling Stone, Slate, and NPR's All Things Considered, among other outlets.
He has also written about architecture and urbanism for various publications, and is a writer and consulting editor for the Time Out travel guide to Washington. He lives in Washington.
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Writer/director Boots Riley's film, about a black telemarketer who adopts "white voice" and finds success, makes sharp observations before devolving into unfocused, bewildering absurdism.
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Elle Fanning stars in this uneven, "perfumed account" of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's romance with poet Percy Shelley, and the fateful weekend that birthed her novel Frankenstein.
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In this disjointed and bewildering French film, Isabelle Huppert plays a mousy schoolteacher who gains a more assertive — and occasionally lethal — persona after being struck by lighting.
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Michel Hazanavicius' film about the romance (and breakup) of director Jean-Luc Godard and actress Anne Wiazemsky adopts many of that director's signature flourishes, to lesser effect.
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In this CGI-driven adaptation of Beatrix Potter's children's tale, violent slapstick and obnoxious behavior replace the gentle whimsy of the books.
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Greg Barker's film favors candid emotional moments over a meaningful examination of how key policy initiatives were shaped in the closing months of the Obama presidency.
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Lake Bell's follow-up to 2013's In a World ...lacks that film's focus and drive but finds itself in the final act, once its pacing grows "agreeably manic."
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French writer-director Luc Besson mounts a hugely imaginative sci-fi spectacle, but builds it around papier-thin characters and dialogue.
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In Abacus: Too Small To Jail, Steve James, who made Hoop Dreams, tells the story of a very small bank that really was prosecuted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
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Critic Mark Jenkins calls Joseph Cedar's tale of a cipher (Richard Gere) who finds himself at the center of a web of personal and political machinations "intricate, rollicking and sometimes sad."