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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Bruno Dumont's histrionic if not particularly hysterical comedy pits rich against poor in a picturesque seaside town; the film's leisurely paced slapstick is "more intriguing than involving."
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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."
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A binge-drinking American woman unwittingly controls a monster that's destroying Seoul in this tone-deaf comedy; the film's lumbering attempts to subvert our rom-com expectations fall flat.
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It'll help to brush up on your Impressionists before seeing writer-director Danièle Thompson's decades-spanning portrait of Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne, but the film deftly avoids biopic clichés.
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Director Craig Johnson's film, based on the Daniel Clowes graphic novel, wants us to invest in a misanthrope's grumbling attempts to reconnect to humanity. Yet its uneven tone keeps us at a distance.
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French writer-director Francois Ozon adapts Broken Lullaby, Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 melodrama about a mysterious Frenchman and a German war-widow in the aftermath of World War I.
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French writer-director Julia Ducournau's debut feature, about a vegetarian veterinary student who develops a taste for viscera, "is as tiresome as it is scandalous," says critic Mark Jenkins.
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This Chinese-U.S. co-production, based on a graphic novel by Chinese rock star Zheng Jun, pads its way through a familiar story about a mastiff who wants to make it big in the music industry.
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This visually impressive, narratively muddy, pseudo-historic monster movie disappoints. "It's bonkers in theory, but prosaic in execution," says critic Mark Jenkins.
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Martian, Martian, Martian!: Asa Butterfield stars as a Mars-born teen who struggles under Earth's gravity — and a treacly script — in this sci-fi romance.