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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The film "doesn't reinvent much of anything, but its jumble of biography, fantasy, and backstage melodrama" is at least better than yet another version of A Christmas Carol.
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A boy born with a facial disfigurement enters a new school in this low-stakes, superficial "sundae-sweet tale" from the director of The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
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Angela Robinson's biopic of the colorful sexual triad behind the comic-book character is sweet, but so concerned with rendering their kinkiness as bold and important that it forgets to have fun.
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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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Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara star as a couple on opposite sides of a divide that should part them — but it doesn't, quite.
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An Embarrassment of Ritchie: Charlie Hunnam stars as a hunky Arthur in a film that crackles with director Guy Ritchie's distinctive style but sinks under its bloated special effects.
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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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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.