The videos speak for themselves — and provide a worthwhile time capsule of a turbulent era.

Transfixed is proudly personal, which is its strength.

In essence, the film is a series of reflections, but fortunately for us, many of them are thought-provoking.

Ovation has a self-involved air that may be off-putting to those who don’t feel deeply immersed in that world. You may get the sense you’ve wandered into a super-intense acting class or someone’s therapy session — a hothouse atmosphere that’s oppressive.

It’s a satisfying drama that inverts the usual way of building interest and suspense. Instead of wondering what’s going to happen, we sit with the knowledge and wait for every character to react to what we already know.

It’s a character study of a character who isn’t worth studying. It’s a revenge movie, but when the revenge comes, the only person you feel like getting even with is the screenwriter.

What starts out as a bottom-feeder noir a la “Breaking Bad” or “Hell or High Water” transitions into scattershot ambitions of being a mythic tragedy.

Aside from a few moments involving Dudikoff, American Ninja 4 is a formula action picture without appeal, and its contradictions and illogical turns of plot don't help matters. [09 Mar 1991, p.C3]

How much of it is true? Well, all of it. It happened, at least in the inner life of an imaginative boy, whose boundless curiosity served as the launching pad for a unique and productive life.

What follows is everything a story like this demands — car chases, shootouts and trying to stop an explosive device by cutting the right wire — but there’s little fresh here.

1 Angry Black Man is a more thoughtful and intellectual exercise than its prosaic and incendiary title at first suggests.

The best parts of Ai WeiWei: Yours Truly include the scenes at Ai’s studio in Beijing, as he conceives the project and we get a glimpse into how the sausage is made; and the titular focus on political prisoners.

Who Are You, Charlie Brown? can be a little too slick and clean, especially for those of us who harbor fond memories of the rough edges in A Charlie Brown Christmas (which premiered back in 1965, and still gets its moment in the sun here). But overall it’s a smart and pleasant revisiting of the Peanuts gang in all their idiosyncratic charm — a charm that remains remarkably durable and true.

If anything, this modest but entirely charming movie may deserve a tiny slice of immortality by showing the kind of goofy, escapist fun that can be created even in a grim time.

We don’t always get a full picture of Barbara Lee, however, there’s no doubt for a single frame that this consummate politician — a pragmatic firebrand — is long overdue for recognition beyond the Bay Area.

It’s a telling scene, musicians enjoying the company of other musicians, professionals all. Guy is a bluesman’s bluesman. They flock to see him jam; he’s still playing ’em, and still losing ’em.

Defined only by their scars, all three lead characters feel generic, as if Werthman built them out of archetypes that ran through his case studies.

It’s not boring bad, but flashy bad. It’s not “I’m sick of this, already.” It’s “I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

This Place Rules isn’t the last or best word on the events of that day in 2021, but it’s a fresh angle and one that was hard-won. Callaghan didn’t just turn over a rock to get this story, he burrowed under the rock and lived there for months.

With its picture-perfect Taipei cityscapes, appealing cast and soothing, smoothed-over storyline, Love in Taipei makes for a stress-free comfort watch. Fans of the book may just wish it had been truer to its source material — after all, isn’t teendom supposed to feel a little dramatic?

The film doesn’t deny that justice must be served, and those who commit crimes must pay. Its question is: How it is paid fairly to the satisfaction of victims and their families and to the benefit of society? The answers are down the road, many miles ahead.

Though some of the acting has a stilted feeling, the emotional charge and unusual look of the film linger.

The new movie splits the difference between the horrible and the hilarious, with predictably lukewarm results. Still, the story is delicious enough to survive an earnest treatment.

Even without containing a modern frame of film, “Apollo 13: Survival” seems current, even without the coincidence of Americans stranded in space.

Whatever one might think of these flourishes, Peterson’s movie accomplishes an important objective: getting the question of Lincoln’s complicated male relationships more out into the open. It’s a commentary in and of itself that it took so many years for this fascinating topic to get to the screen.

One can’t but admire the resilience of the film’s subjects, and when the story turns to the dedicated army of teachers in programs such as the Children’s Literacy Project (teachakidtoread.com), it becomes downright positive.

Nate Parker’s film isn’t always successful at balancing empathy with suspense or its prison reform message with character development. But there are engaging moments from start to finish, with a plot that, while not as surprising as writer-director Parker may have thought, wracks nerves multiple times.