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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Regina Hall stars in this comedy set in a chain sports bar where young female servers scramble for tips, but the underwritten screenplay relies on a ceaseless stream of clunky one-liners.
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Weiner is a documentary about the fall of Anthony Weiner's 2013 campaign for mayor. The access that Weiner and his wife allowed the filmmakers is a little baffling, but it makes for quite a story.
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Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino creates a world of incidents and asides in a Swiss spa hotel, where pals played by Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel like to get away from it all.
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The new thriller Goodnight Mommy follows a child's simple what-if question to horrific lengths.
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Director and co-writer Mia Hansen-Love tells the tale of a young man, based on her own brother, who finds and then loses a deep attachment to the electronic dance music of Paris in the 1990s.
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Sandy McLeod's documentary is a portrait of Cary Fowler, an agriculturalist who is building a biological archive to maintain crop diversity.
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The docudrama 24 Days doesn't try to explain the thinking of those who abducted and killed a Jewish Parisian. Instead, it considers what can be known about the motives of others.
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With Divergent, Hollywood turns to another hit young-adult trilogy for inspiration. Shailene Woodley stars as a 16-year-old searching for her place in a divided dystopian society.
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A new 3-D take on a formative Russian war story has its impressive moments, but ultimately feels contrived and confusing.
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Critic Mark Jenkins reviews a quirky double-bill of animal documentaries. One pairs a visual poem about urban crows in Japan with a travelogue following the daily perambulations of a cat living with a German couple in an American suburb.