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 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." -
In "the most conventional movie of [director Todd] Haynes' career," Mark Ruffalo plays a lawyer taking on DuPont. The film distills years of litigation into an urgent story. -
Ang Lee directs Smith (and a digitally de-aged Smith) in this "bland, sluggish and sentimental" thriller. -
Peter Farrelly's tale of a black musician chauffeured through the Deep South of the 1960s by a white driver is "a well-meaning but glib and shallow ode to interracial healing." -
Writer-director Sarah Colangelo's film features a finely calibrated performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal as a teacher obsessed with a student. The result is a "keenly excruciating" tragedy. -
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. -
A heist isn't as easy as the movies might lead you to believe. That's the lesson learned by four brats who try to steal expensive rare books in a fact-based story about being terrible at crime. -
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. -
A upper-middle class snob goes to live with her bohemian sister and gets drawn into the world of seniors' dance classes in this "sweet-natured if overlong" British film. -
In this CGI-driven adaptation of Beatrix Potter's children's tale, violent slapstick and obnoxious behavior replace the gentle whimsy of the books.
