Mark Jenkins

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NPR, Slant Magazine, Washington Post
For 383 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 52% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Mark Jenkins' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 90 Drug War
Lowest review score: 5 Grown Ups 2
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 221 out of 383
  2. Mixed: 133 out of 383
  3. Negative: 29 out of 383
383 movie reviews
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    • 65 Metascore
    • 55 Mark Jenkins
    Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Many of the White House scenes are jarringly motley, as Whitaker maintains Gaines' dignity against a series of performances that range from bland (James Marsden's JFK) to cartoonish (Liev Schreiber's LBJ). It comes as a relief when Daniels reduces Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford to TV clips — though that strategy makes the film even more of a stylistic jumble.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Charlie Victor Romeo
    That the same performers keep returning in different roles, playing Peruvian and Japanese flyers as well as American ones, only adds to the sense of man as machine. Everything, and everyone, must run like clockwork. Yet no apparatus is foolproof.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Mark Jenkins
    Not Fade Away
    Music drives the movie, and the producers popped for the real stuff: Robert Johnson, Moby Grape and - curiously - the Sex Pistols are all here. The soundtrack is so overstuffed that it relegates Beatles and Dylan tunes to the end credits.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Windfall
    A veteran film editor making her first feature, Israel emphasizes the area's low-key beauty.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Mark Jenkins
    Faust
    German history and culture are among Sokurov's concerns in this visually compelling, intellectually scattershot movie.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Mark Jenkins
    Circumstance
    Circumstance is best during its simpler, more naturalistic moments. In one, Mehran rebuffs a junkie who stumbles into the mosque, only to see that an Islamic hardliner is more compassionate.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 55 Mark Jenkins
    Deadfall
    The movie's violence, although gruesome, flirts with slapstick, and the story appears bound for domestic comedy when all the major characters sit down for Thanksgiving dinner at June and Chet's grand Victorian farmhouse. But the meal becomes more freak show than satire.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    The Salt of Life
    The Salt of Life is easygoing and naturalistic, but clearly a work of imagination.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 65 Mark Jenkins
    The French Minister
    The French Minister boasts robust pacing, screwball-comedy banter and an exuberant central performance. For most American viewers, though, the movie could use footnotes to go with its subtitles.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Made in Dagenham
    The film, while unfailingly entertaining, feels a little small for its subject.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Mark Jenkins
    Paradise: Love
    Teresa's doggedness parallels the movie's own. Paradise: Love would be more compelling if it had a second act in which either its protagonist or one of her boy toys came to some sort of realization. Instead, Seidl's strategy is to reiterate and escalate, which is finally more exhausting than illuminating.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Air Doll (2009)
    Overly long and occasionally clumsy, Air Doll can't be counted among Kore-eda's best. But much of it is lovely and expressive, and it's one of those films that can haunt viewers long after they've left the theater.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Mark Jenkins
    Wild Grass
    Wild Grass is an elegant vessel for outlandish thoughts and troubling impulses. In his rejection of cinematic naturalism, Resnais has made a movie that's both utterly contrived and compellingly lifelike.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 55 Mark Jenkins
    Get Him to the Greek
    Brand's character, who combines Bono's moral sanctimony with Keith Richards' supernatural hedonism, ultimately doesn't add up.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Mark Jenkins
    I Am Not Madame Bovary
    Although it’s intended as a satire, director Feng Xiaogang’s movie has a literary tone, a leisurely pace and relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. It captures not only Lian’s frustration, but also the exasperation of the authorities who must deal with the demanding woman during her 11-year quest for justice.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Mark Jenkins
    A Brilliant Young Mind
    A Brilliant Young Mind is less stuffy than the usual cinematic ode to British smarts and schooling. But that still can’t save this tale of eccentric genius from being profoundly conventional.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Night Catches Us
    The movie evokes its time and place so potently that it almost doesn't matter that Hamilton's script proves unequal to her vision.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Orgasm Inc.
    Canner's eye-opening, entertaining account of the search for the little pill that supplies the Big O is looney-tunes enough without the cartoon asides.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Renoir
    Renoir doesn't present a particularly dynamic tale, and its attempts at stage-like drama — notably the sometimes epigrammatic dialogue — can seem overdone. But the performances are assured, the ambiance impeccable and the themes resonant.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Mark Jenkins
    The Happy Prince
    Fortunately, the maudlin moments are offset by fine performances, flashes of humor and a visual sense that’s more astute than the script.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 65 Mark Jenkins
    The Hedgehog
    Perhaps the ending worked better in the book, Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which sold more than a million copies in France. Certainly this adaptation, Mona Achache's directorial debut, is a very bookish movie.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 85 Mark Jenkins
    We Have a Pope
    We Have a Pope is not the filmmaker's next assault on a Roman patriarch. It's a half-sweet, half-rueful existential drama in which the satire comes secondary.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Mark Jenkins
    Last Call at the Oasis
    The movie presents grim assessments from such experts as the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick and professor and author Robert Glennon, yet it ends with a flurry of hopeful notes.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Mark Jenkins
    Michael
    It's hard to make a movie about a pederast without being exploitative, and Michael eventually comes to feel like an art house stunt.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Film Socialisme
    Film Socialisme, his (Godard) latest intellectual assault, includes grating noise, scruffy camera-phone video and subtitles in fractured "Navajo English."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Mark Jenkins
    The Creator
    Overloaded with incidents, effects and explosions, “The Creator” fails to develop the personalities and relationships that would give its central characters an affecting humanity. The movie’s attempt to touch the heart comes off as, well, artificial.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou)
    Not even the presence of a goth-chick hotel clerk could turn Nobody Else But You into "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." The movie may teeter on the edge of Switzerland, but its playful sensibility is entirely French.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Mark Jenkins
    Hors Satan (Outside Satan)
    Strange and uncompromisingly personal. It's also vivid and unforgettable.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 55 Mark Jenkins
    Out of the Furnace
    Cooper does slow the action and set it in the least glamorous of circumstances, which drains the pleasure from the thriller conventions. But just because Out of the Furnace isn't much fun doesn't make it profound.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Mark Jenkins
    It's Kind of a Funny Story
    Despite some dark undercurrents, the movie emphasizes humor, and its best moments are more than kind of funny.
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