While raising his son in Boston, Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) contemplates the state of the world as implied by human disasters on the six o’clock news, chases down some of the victims, and occasionally gets them to ruminate on-camera. This 1996 film has some absorbing bits—including two segments with McElwee’s former teacher and friend Charleen (who’s graced all his major films to date) and another with a Korean millionaire in the deep south who’s feeling his way into a new marriage while trying to get over the murder of his previous wife—but it often comes across as willful autobiography predicated on the autobiographer finding new material. As always, McElwee gets a certain mileage out of his bemused, laconic persona, but the other people’s stories carry most of the interest. (JR)