Dennis Harvey

The Harbinger disappoints only in that it’s good enough to make you wish it were better — that it left an indelible impression rather than a slightly vague one.

What at first looks like a standard missing-person suspense tale turns out to have a more complicated agenda — but it is so haphazardly advanced and clumsily articulated, the film itself seems to be fumbling around for a cohering structure or mood.

It’s a well-crafted enterprise that leaves its human subject a bit of an enigma, albeit one we empathize with enough to feel sorely disappointed that his tumultuous life never arrived at a place of security or peace.

The combination of gay protagonists, mental illness exploration, horror tropes, and surreal elements that gesture toward “Donnie Darko” make for an ambitious mix that holds attention, even if the uneven, somewhat muddled results are ultimately more effortful than insightful.

This solid little thriller does a good job balancing character drama and suspense elements, its smooth craftsmanship belying the creator’s newbie status in multiple creative roles.

It’s a compelling tale, well cast and directed with vivid intensity by Ronnie Sandahl. Still, the somewhat frustratingly limited insight we get into our hero’s addled head may affect export prospects for a film that is more about psychology than athletics.

Competent performances and a slick veneer make this revamp go down easily enough. Still, one wishes Rick had placed more emphasis on Hitchcockian suspense, rather than trusting the slow-moving tale will hold us via plot and character complexities that really aren’t particularly evident.

A slam-dunk entertainment.

The Passenger doesn’t quite transcend its basic creature-feature premise, yet it does make getting to a familiar destination more fun than many a similar enterprise has managed.

Just when you think this nothing-burger can’t get any more exasperating, it spends a full 10 post-fadeout minutes on final credits.

This solid both-sides-now overview also raises wider questions regarding humanity’s sometimes-hypocritical ethics toward what we eat, where we get it, and how.

If Alex Hardcastle’s effortfully high-spirited Netflix feature isn’t exactly good, it’s still good enough to provide reasonable throwaway fun, thanks much less to the material than to a cast that elevates it when they can.

While best enjoyed by the already converted, it provides enough showbiz insight and interpersonal drama to entertain newbies.

What might have seemed a familiar if sad drama in live-action form benefits from this relative novelty of presentation, which lends a certain universality, as well as heightened viewer access, to Salomon’s story. But the rather pedestrian animation here also makes Charlotte a bit of a disappointment.

Writer-director Brendan Muldowney’s latest lacks the thick atmospherics that might have punched across a sketchy screenplay, which falls short in expanding the premise of his 2004 short “The Ten Steps.”

While there have been worse-crafted, even more routinely formulaic Netflix horror efforts, this one takes the cake for sheer whateverness of barely-there plot, concept, character detailing and so on.

If it falls a bit short as human drama, however, Szumowska’s latest — a 180-degree turn from her last, the excellent Polish allegorical tale “Never Gonna Snow Again” — is fully satisfying as an appreciation of Nature as magnificent adversary.

Being a solid cut above average is good enough, given so much formulaic mediocrity among thrillers cluttering the streaming market.

What keeps the film from being anything more than an enterprising but minor diversion is that, with Shawn being is such a loud comic character from the get-go, scares and laughs alike don’t have much space to build. Winter gives his all, entertainingly so. But the performance is also dialed too high, too soon, its ultimate payoff diminished because we’ve already had so much of this protagonist screaming, bragging and sniveling.

In the end, Fear offers the most beguiling kind of plea for tolerance, via antic suggestion that any other behavior is strictly for dolts whose mob mentality makes them look very stupid indeed. It’s a lesson that goes down easily with this much deadpan charm and skill on tap.

Ultimately there are a few twists too many, pushing the story into a realm of excess contrivance. There’s not enough time or nuance to lend numerous narrative turnabouts plausibility.

As directed by Nick Moran in obvious imitation of executive producer Danny Boyle’s most hyperbolic style, scripted by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, this apparently loose interpretation of the subject’s memoir becomes a hyperventilating “Behind the Music” caricature, all familiar flash and precious little substance.

Its cast struggling against material with little real-world or emotional logic, the attempted “surreal” elements uninspired both conceptually and aesthetically, this is a misfire whose intentions are as murky as its results are hapless.

This energetic spin through high school antics redolent of everything since “Ferris Bueller” is colorful and amusing enough to entertain viewers looking for a familiar mix of bad-taste gags in a squeaky-clean suburban setting.

This quasi-horror tale of bickering vacationers running afoul of disturbed locals strings together various well-worn clichés with a notable lack of suspense, plausibility and style, while excelling in the realm of characters behaving like complete idiots.

The director shoots and cuts almost every scene so that the most innocuous action seems charged with the expectation that something awful is about to erupt, cranking viewer tension to an unpleasant degree.

Julian Higgins’ first feature can be taken as a drama with thriller elements or a low-key thriller with atypical dramatic nuance, working either way as a quietly effective balance between genre, social issue and character study elements.

The on-screen actors’ raw hamming is nicely complemented by the voice performers’ relatively deadpan contributions, which only render the dialogue and situations even more absurd.