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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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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The slaying of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago cop has been widely reported but Richard Rowley's documentary lays out the CPD's cover-up, and its ultimate collapse, in stark detail.
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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."
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A French dance troupe drinks sangria spiked with LSD and descends into carnal violence in a film that turns into "just another Noé freakout, familiar in tone and stylistic tics."
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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."
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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."
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Reinaldo Marcus Green's exquisite drama examines, from three perspectives, the aftermath of the slaying of an unarmed black man; the film offers "neither unalloyed despair nor implausible hope."
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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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Writer/director Boots Riley's film, about a black telemarketer who adopts "white voice" and finds success, makes sharp observations before devolving into unfocused, bewildering absurdism.
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Director Hany Abu-Assad's film, which stars Kate Winslet, Idris Elba and a cute dog, is prettily shot but blandly predictable.