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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Both didactic and engrossing, director Scott Z. Burns' film about the investigation into post-9/11 CIA interrogation techniques stars Adam Driver as an idealistic Senate staffer.
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Cynthia Erivo is quite good, and the story of Harriet Tubman is a tale worth telling, but as presented here it's earnest, conventional and "fundamentally inert."
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Ang Lee directs Smith (and a digitally de-aged Smith) in this "bland, sluggish and sentimental" thriller.
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This "stylish but overloaded satire is less sober narrative than drunken tone poem — a buzzing, throbbing attempt to simulate" what it was like inside the mogul-turned-prime-minister's circle.
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In this fierce, elliptical, episodic drama, a team of children somewhere in the Latin American jungle are tasked with guarding an American hostage.
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Bart Freundlich's gender-flipped remake of a twisty Danish film is glossy, slick and strangely sedate.
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In Barbarians, writer/director Radu Jude's ruminating, ruefully funny Romanians debate history, propaganda and truth while mounting a re-enactment of a mass murder.
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Shot on vintage, lo-fi video cameras, this talky, didactic film finds a bickering couple beginning to question themselves once they start to question a tale told by an older black man.
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Director Denys Arcand continues a series about the discontents of Montreal intellectuals with The Fall Of The American Empire. While it elides some complications, its range of references feels fresh.
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Joanna Hogg's tale of a London film student who falls for a manipulative older man is at war with itself: Hogg's "confessional memoir draws you in, while her clinical style pushes you away."