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.

'Bidder 70,' Still Raising His Hand To Be Heard

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Credit First Run Features

Supporters of environmental activist Tim DeChristopher picket outside his criminal trial. The economics student ran into trouble with the federal government when he bid on — and won — mineral rights he had no intention of exploiting.

Credit First Run Features

DeChristopher (center) and other members of his Peaceful Uprising environmental action group brought their discontent to Washington, as documented in Beth and George Gage's film. DeChristopher would eventually serve 21 months in federal prison.

By Mark Jenkins

In its final months, the George W. Bush administration hastily organized a mineral-rights auction for federal land in Utah, much of it near national parks. Environmentalist and economics student Tim DeChristopher attended the sale and — impulsively, he says — bid on and won 22,000 acres he had no intention of exploiting.

The feds came down on him like a ton of oil derricks. DeChristopher was threatened with as many as 10 years in prison, and ultimately spent 21 months behind bars.

4:03 pm

Thu May 16, 2013

'Augustine' And Her Diagnosis Get Another Look

Credit Jean Claude Lother / Music Box Films

Augustine (the French singer-actress billed as Soko) was a 19th-century Paris housemaid diagnosed with the then-fashionable condition known as "hysteria" — a catchall used to label many ailments women suffered in that age.

By Mark Jenkins

Onstage, in front of an audience, the young woman seemingly goes into a trance, overcome by a power that shakes and contorts her. The commotion appears profoundly sexual; she grabs at her crotch as she writhes. When the woman reaches some kind of release, the spell is broken, and she becomes calm. She leaves the stage to enthusiastic applause.

4:03 pm

Thu May 2, 2013

'In The Air,' A Sense Of Stakes For A '70s Youth

Credit Carol Bethuel / MK/Sundance Selects

Christine (Lola Creton) and Gilles (Clement Metayer) are the sometime couple at the center of Olivier Assayas' smart, clear-eyed examination of a still-painful period in France's recent past.

By Mark Jenkins

In the opening minutes of Something in the Air, the protagonist carves an "A" (for anarchy) into his school desk, and participates in a street demonstration that ends in a punishing flurry of police billy clubs. "The revolution's near," apparently — to quote the 1969 Thunderclap Newman hit that provides the film's title.

4:03 pm

Thu April 18, 2013

Building A Home For A Client Who Can't Live In It

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Credit First Run Features

Artist Jackie Sumell set out to build a dream home for bank robber Herman Wallace, whose additional conviction for killing a prison guard is the subject of a long-running dispute.

Credit First Run Features

A 3-D rendering of Wallace's dream house; Sumell's juxtaposition of the house and Wallace's 6-by-8 prison cell is a statement on the severity of solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious state penitentiary.

By Mark Jenkins

The off-screen protagonist of Herman's House, Herman Wallace, already has a dwelling for his body: a 6-foot-by-8-foot cell at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, aka Angola. But the documentary's on-screen protagonist, Jackie Sumell, wants him also to have a place for his soul: a dream house for a man who desperately needs dreams.

4:03 pm

Thu April 11, 2013

A Hazy Ode 'To The Wonder' Of Hidden Worlds

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Credit Mary Cybulski / Magnolia Pictures

Jane (Rachel McAdams) rekindles an old affair with the taciturn Neil (Ben Affleck), an environmental investigator whose work takes him to a remote Oklahoma town in the enigmatic new film To the Wonder.

Credit Mary Cybulski / Magnolia Pictures

Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a mysterious French-Ukrainian woman, functions as a kind of embodiment of feminine grace in Terrence Malick's film.

By Mark Jenkins

Pretty but inert, To the Wonder is a vaporous mystery wrapped in a gauzy enigma — a cinematic riddle that'll appeal principally to those eager for another piece, however tiny, of the puzzle that is Terrence Malick.

To the Wonder continues in the lyrical-to-a-fault mode of the writer-director's The Tree of Life; in fact, this film includes some footage originally shot for that one. But it excludes Rachel Weisz, Amanda Peet, Barry Pepper, Jessica Chastain and Michael Sheen, who all reportedly played roles that vanished from the final cut.

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