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 mix of dramatization and recorded interviews with Jews who managed to hide in plain sight in Berlin despite the Nazi dragnet, this hybrid film fights against itself. -
In this stirring documentary, the secret archive maintained by members of the Warsaw Ghetto comes to vivid life through historical footage and reenactments.
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A Manhattan drug courier has a very bad night in this scrappy but underwritten slacker comedy that plays like an extended sketch. -
Pawel Pawlikowski follows up 2013's Ida with this tale of Polish musicians living under Stalin; it's "an ode to joylessness that feels historically credible but narratively arbitrary." -
Long on CGI but short on any real inspiration, this adaptation of a fantasy series about giant cities that roam a post-apocalyptic landscape quickly runs out of gas. -
Tom Schilling plays a German painter clearly modeled on Gerhard Richter in this melodrama about the lingering costs of war and the ways they inform both art and artist. -
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." -
Claire Foy takes over the role of Swedish super-hacker Lisbeth Salander in a reboot that reheats stale ideas from many previous spy/hacker movies. -
To play the Sunday Times war reporter Marie Colvin, Rosamund Pike "transform[s] herself into a singular figure, one who goes places few people would and see[s] things that even fewer could handle." -
Director Antonio Mendez Esparza brings a static, theatrical approach to this story of a black single mother and the teenage son who attempts to shoulder his absent father's responsibilities.
