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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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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With an eye on an international audience, this Shanghai-set adaptation of the 18th-century French novel focuses most of its energy on being visually appealing. Critic Mark Jenkins says the setting of the film isn't entirely justified — but it does serve as a glossily seductive distraction.
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Eric Lartigau's French psychological drama follows an aspiring photographer who assumes another man's identity. While the plot may lend itself to the tropes of a thriller, critic Mark Jenkins says it is more focused on the quiet, internal mechanisms of the protagonist's mind.
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Kids' movies — or movies that appeal to the kid in everyone — are the only reliable moneymakers for Hollywood these days. And everybody's doing them: Freaking Martin Scorsese! Spielberg made two! Critic Mark Jenkins explains — and complains.
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Set during the Bosnian War, Angelina Jolie's directorial debut is about the strained relationship between a Serbian soldier (Goran Kostic) and a Bosnian captive.
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David Fincher's English-language The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is less a reinterpretation than a reiteration — a classier, more expensive version of the lurid Swedish film that came before it.
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Director Charles Evans Jr. delivers an animated documentary about a researcher's quest for an addictive ingredient as potent as nicotine — but less prone to causing heart attacks.
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Money talks, and a chatty displaced worker talks back, in a French comic drama that details the clash of capital and labor — and dares to flirt with romance across the front lines.
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Hunger director Steve McQueen and star Michael Fassbender reunite for a stylishly composed story about a sex addict and the sister whose own obsessions may be key to understanding his pathology.