Mark Jenkins
Mark Jenkins reviews movies for NPR.org, as well as for reeldc.com, 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 WAMU-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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A man (Jean Dujardin) becomes obsessed with a deerskin jacket — and pretending to be a film director — in a dark comedy that is "both outlandish and slight."
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Writer/director Kirill Sokolov's stylish and exuberant black comedy involves a corrupt cop, his would-be killer and a sardonic take on contemporary life in Russia.
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Director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty deliver a "lacerating social drama" about a delivery driver (Kris Hitchen) whose demanding job comes with penalties that wipe out his pay.
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Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu's crime flick is "brighter and literally more colorful" than the slow-burn, gray-palette fare you might be expecting.
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A hotel clerk (Tye Sheridan) hides a secret during a murder investigation in a film that explores the affinity between cinema and voyeurism flatly and without nuance.
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Peg (Zoey Deutch) goes into the debt-collection business in a comedy that focuses so narrowly on its self-absorbed main character that the world around her fades to obscurity.
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Stephanie (Blake Lively) trains to become a super-assassin to avenge the murder of her parents in this well-paced, well-directed, but poorly scripted Bond knockoff.
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In this loose, grisly adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story, a family undergoes a series of mutations while Nicolas Cage gets increasingly unhinged; the result is "a gory mess."
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Writer/director Terrence Malick's latest film, based on the life of an Austrian conscientious objector in WWII, "spends much of its three hours musing, or simply being beautiful."
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Director Malina Matsoukas' debut feature, about a black couple on the run, is "more interested in myth-making than storytelling," with striking visuals and an increasingly implausible narrative.