Movie Nation

The new film from award-winning Venezuelan filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas is a lean, quiet and disturbing parable about global capitalism as it is practiced in much of the Third World.

With “The Box” (“La Caja”), the director of “From Afar” pulls us into the sad, mysterious plight of a boy dispatched to the world of giant sweatshops and ruthlessly exploited workers of northern Mexico. And through this poker-faced child, we get a brutal taste of the grim cost of a system still stuck in a Darwinian Wild West era in much of the world.

Hatzín (Hatzín Navarrete) has been sent north by his grandmother to retrieve his father’s body. A bus deposits him at a site where trailers have been set up and officialdom is IDing corpses and turning over remains to next of kin in large, coffin-shaped urns.

We can see where the bodies have come from, and it’s too small and tidy a space for a plane or bus crash. What happened? Hatzín asks no questions, and seems strangely unmoved by the process.

“I’m not crying, grandma,” he tells her by phone (in Spanish with English subtitles). He is young, maybe 13, and apparently estranged from the man whose body is in “La Caja.”

Wandering through the nearby town, he spies a man he is sure is his dad, a man who shrugs off his insistence that he recognizes him. Mario (Hernán Mendoza) is bluff and bearded and patient enough to hear the kid out. There’s a flash of compassion as the boy comes back, still insisting, and Mario buys him a drink and offers him bus fare.

Nothing doing, the kid seems to think. “There’s been a mistake” he tells the forensics team at what we slowly figure out is a mass burial site. Hatzín will dump the box on them and make a pest of himself to this stranger, who indulges, then bristles at and finally takes him in.

Hatzín will discover an underworld of labor recruiting, Amazon warehouse-sized sewing factories and peasant labor coming from near and far for work in what one recruiter describes, over and over, as Mexico’s “war” “with the Chinese,” a war with opportunities for quick cash but sometimes deadly consequences, from deceitful exploitation to truck hijackings and worse.

Vigas and fellow screenwriters Paula Markovich and Laura Santullo limit the dialogue, pulling the viewer in, forcing us to plumb the mystery of this unnamed place much as Hatzin does.

We ponder the kid’s annoying persistence and why this burly stranger is so tolerant of it, until he isn’t.

We hear the pitches to workers, and like Hatzin, observe how the promises differ from reality. Some are smart enough to see they’re being exploited, and start speaking up to others.

And we’re immersed in Mario’s reality a former sewing factory worker who saw the real money was in working with middle men and small-sweatshop owner-operators, filling buses with poor people eager to work, unaware of the trap they’re signing up for.

“Be happy with what you have,” they’re counseled. But if they aren’t?

The kid’s journey will take him from “You’re too honest” into things he’d never think he was capable of. It’s like an initiation into the drug world saga, but with lower cash stakes and cheap, ready-to-wear fashions as its product.

Young Navarette doesn’t give away what Hatzin is thinking, which serves the layers that cover where the narrative is going but robs “The Box” of emotional power. The film can feel documentary-clinical as it lays out this world, this “system” and the gregarious Marios who run it.

Mendoza lets us see the older’s man’s kindly, then cunning sides, and wonder which tack he will finally take with this bright boy he’s brought into his trust.

And through them Vigas shows us what’s behind that Walmart T-shirt that lasts two or three washings, that Target dress that loses its color just as quickly, and the true cost of anything that seems cheap, but really isn’t.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Hatzín Navarrete and Hernán Mendoza

Credits: Directed by Lorenzo Vigas, scripted by Paula Markovich, Laura Santullo and Lorenzo Vigas. A MUBI release.

Running time: 1:33

“Aquaman” and “Dune” hunk Jason Momoa figures prominently in the advertising for “The Last Manhunt.” He’s in just three or four scenes in it, but he co-wrote the story, so fair enough.

And he’s the one who got this new version of the story of “Desert Runner” Willie “Boy” Brown on film. This “true story” Western is a tad malnourished, stolid and depressingly downbeat. But it’s a tragic story. Even if you use a lot of Native American actors and Native American plainsong in the score, it would take a special touch to spruce up the few moments of action, lift the pathos of the couple on the run and make the quarrelsome posse entertaining enough to watch.

That touch is mostly missing here. But the story is still fascinating.

Willie Boy Brown was a Chemehuevi Indian (Southern Paiute) who tried to run off with his distant cousin girlfriend after accidentally killing her disapproving father. He’s been the subject of legend, lore, a book titled “The Last Manhunt” and a 1969 Western — “Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here” — starring Robert Redford as the reluctant sheriff hunting the fugitives, and Italian American actor Robert Blake in the title role.

Set in 1909, “Manhunt” is a “closing of the West” tale, a literal last posse-on-horseback “manhunt” through Joshua Tree, Twentynine Palms and environs, promising striking scenery, tragic young love, endless searching for water as well as the man the posse is hunting, and violence.

Martin Sensmeier of “Wind River” and “Yellowstone” is Willie, Hawaiian actress Mainei Kinimaka (of the Momoa TV series “See”) is Carlotta, the daughter of a medicine man (Zahn McClarnon) who has to track down the 16 year-old to save her from an “inappropriate” match. “You’re BLOOD,” he reminds them both.

That won’t stop Willie Boy. His second meeting with the father over his beloved leads to an argument and a shooting. Tribe members, who tracked them down when they tried to run off the first time, are ready to do it again. But a shooting means the recently-widowed, depressed and crawling into a bottle sheriff (director Christian Camargo) is involved now, with an armed posse of men of varying abilities and tolerance.

A reporter (Mojean Aria) cynically tries to join their crew, willing to manipulate the story which he recognizes needs some sizzle — an editor lowers Carlotta’s age to 14 — and that “You lack a great ending.”

The opening acts have the novelty of filming an under-filmed part of the desert southwest, with palm trees and Joshua Trees and deep canyons adjoining the vast expanse of desert. But the leads are just bland and there’s no sugar-coating that.

The middle acts, posse-centered, are talky and argumentative and don’t have quite enough conflict to engage the viewer.

And the finale can’t get here soon enough.

Momoa, playing a Native named Big Jim, turns up here and there, not enough to add spark to a picture whose score sets the tone, and is eventually overwhelmed by funereal strings — lots of cellos in tears.

I appreciate the effort it took to get a Western made in this day and age. It’s a good story. Redford knew it. So does Momoa. And there are some scattered stand-out moments.

But the relative poverty of the production shows in every too-clean-to-have-been-hiking-through-the-desert costume, every wish-they-could-have-cast-a-pricier, showier actor or actress, every “Let’s hire a script doctor to tighten/quicken/juice-this-up” suggestion ignored.

Rating: R for some violence and language

Cast: Martin Sensmeier, Mainei Kinimaka, Raoul Max Trujillo, Brandon Oakes, Amy Seimetz, Mojean Aria, Christian Camargo and Jason Momoa.

Credits: Directed by Christian Carmago, scripted by Thomas Pa’a Sibbett, Jason Momoa. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:43

As tales of a family holed up after an apocalypse go, “Shadows” isn’t particularly bad. Carlo Lavagna’s thriller has a decent sense of isolation and a time-tested source of conflict.

But the director of “Ariana” commits two cardinal sins in showing the lives of two teen girls and their all-knowing, self-sufficient mother. One is that is that where he’s taking us is laughably obvious. And the second is this obvious tale is so drawn-out as to give away the fact that he knows it’s stunningly predictable, but he figures that by padding out the story and the running time, he can fool the viewer and create a hint of suspense.

He can’t.

Mia Threapleton (Kate Winslet’s daughter) and Lola Petticrew are Alma and Alex, two teens who live in a room in the Stardust Hotel, not that long abandoned, but certainly going to seed. They keep each other entertained during the day in in a building whose windows are all covered over, sharing a room at one end of the place while Mom (Saskia Reeves) has her quarters at the other end.

“What’s the first rule?”

“Don’t go out during the day!”

Their lives are lived by lantern light, as their mother has told them of the dangers of daylight, of the perils of being out in it. She hunts and checks traps by night and keeps them fed. And they study the plants in the greenhouse, Mom’s school of nature, and other home school-able subjects.

All they know of the outside world they pick up from their mother, who has responded to whatever calamity has befallen civilization by going full naturism.

“Forgive us, Mother, for breaking the sacred bonds,” she prays to Mother Earth. “Thank you, Mother, for giving us everything.”

But young Alma is starting to have questions, and sister Alex is closing in on outright defiance. Mom goes off and leaves them on their own for days, and that fires their curiosity and creates opportunities for mischief. Going into the forbidden “cloak room,” where the detritus of “The Before” years are stored sets Mom off and pushes the girls towards open revolt.

So, Garden of Eden, Fall from Paradise parables anyone?

The acting is as effective as this simple script requires, with the odd animated or attempted emotional moment, most of which don’t land. As slow as it is, it feels as if there are details that’ve been left out, motivations under-motivated.

And it takes so long to get going that any delay in delivering us to the inevitable conclusion is downright interminable.

Rating: unrated, some violence, a sexual image

Cast: Mia Threapleton, Lola Petticrew and Saskia Reeves

Credits: Directed by Carlo Lavanga, scripted by Damiano Bruè, Fabio Mollo, Vanessa Picciarelli, Tiziana Triana A Red Water release.

Running time: 1:42

Fun, flamboyant enough to remind us of all the gossipy speculation that used to follow him around, and cool.

Because that’s one part of his image Daniel Craig won’t want to shed.

When you boil a thriller down to the bare essentials, you realize just how many of them get by on one killer gimmick. Jimmy Stewart, busted leg, trapped in his apartment watching a murder and cover-up through his “Rear Window” or Glenn Close falling for her possibly murderous client in “Jagged Edge,” any hook that distinguishes your film from the pack is a good thing.

The Spanish thriller “The Chalk Line” lays out a pretty good hook right there in the title. A lost, disturbed child who refuses to speak was somehow conditioned to live her life within the confines of chalk lines that circumscribe her world. What monster abused her to live life this? Or what manner of monster needs those boundaries to protect others from her?

The debut feature of Spanish director and co-writer Ignacio Tatay doesn’t limit itself to those two possibilities, which is both an asset and a hindrance in this moody but frustrating mystery. And the more answers it provides in the third act, the more frustrating it becomes. Simply put, it doesn’t play “fair” by thriller rules, and fizzes out in a formulaic denouement.

Paula and Simón are driving to their remote Spanish home when they see a child wandering in the middle of the road at night. She survives the accident she causes, but neither the police nor the medical authorities charged with treating “Clara” (Eva Tennear) can get a word out of her.

And there’s this thing she does with chalk…

The couple (Elena Anaya, Pablo Molinero) takes an interest in what happens to her, the hunt for her family and her well-being. The child screams, lashes out and has to be restrained in the hospital. But the fact that she responds just a bit to Paula means they’ll take her home and attempt some sort of extreme “fostering” to keep her calm until she gets better and/or they discover who she belongs to.

“Simón and I will make sure nothing bad happens to you,” Paula assures the child, who may not even speak Spanish (you can also watch this dubbed into English). But first we, and then husband Simón, wonder if the source of anything “bad” might be Clara herself.

The script teases that something supernatural could be afoot, something innately sinister in the blonde girl whose first words seem random noises, unless you speak German.

And then the film abruptly turns in an entirely more conventional and less satisfying direction and the movie lost me.

Still, this idea of a scared or scary child who can be limited in her access to freedom, weapons or threats — either received or delivered — by chalk lines she draws, erases and redraws, is an intriguing twist that held my attention through the first act and again in the finale.

Anaya has to carry the movie, and she struggles to keep her all-trusting character interesting as Paula does her own digging into where this child came from and what made her this way. Bigger emotional moments were called for, better manipulations of suspense in the script and choosing shots and edits that heighten this alarming moment or that revelation would have helped.

“The Chalk Line” is never a complete write-off, but there is no getting around that it isn’t what it could have been.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Elena Anaya, Paulo Molinaro and Eva Tennear

Credits: Directed by Ignacio Tatay, scripted by Isabel Peña and Ignacio Tatay. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

Every few years, Disney likes to remind a new generation of fans that this global entertainment colossus was “all started by a mouse,” as founder Walt Disney used to say.

“Mickey: The Story of a Mouse” is such a reminder, a Disney+ history of Mickey, his visual and psychological evolution over the almost 100 years since his creation. It’s a slicker version of similar works that Disney has produced, mainly for television, as that was Walt’s original vision for how to use the medium — promoting his animated brand.

Filmmaker Jeff Malmberg interviews animators and animation historians, artists and art historians, Walt biographers and Disney archivists and fans young and old, folding that fresh material in with snippets of Walt’s earlier TV, big screen and oral history accounts of how the Mouse that Made Him and his company came to be.

It’s not a deeper than deep dive into Mickiana, even though it does mention the shared credit for creation (with animator Ub Iwerks), Mickey’s racist cartoons in the ’30s, Walt’s increasingly conservative politics and the like. “Mickey” is fittingly built around another reboot of the mouse — a new hand-animated short, “Mickey in a Minute” — a cartoon that takes us through many (not all) of the looks that the mouse has had on screen, from the 1920s to today. That short film — included here — isn’t the whole story, or even that satisfying. But it gives us the general idea, with a few new flourishes, just like the documentary it inspired.

For my money, the entire film could have taken place in the Disney Archives in Burbank. Still drawings from the earliest Mickey cartoons, including the breakout sound film “Steamboat Willy,” flip books illustrating every change in Mickey’s design — “Fantasia” Mickey, “Mickey Mouse Club” Mickey, “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” Mickey even the more recent “Ren & Stimpy” ish Mickey for more anarchic TV appearances — it’s all here.

The studio that owes it all to a mouse has been quite the packrat when it comes to preserving its history and that of its most important intellectual property.

Malmberg & Co. take us to the Disney family farm in Marceline, Missouri and to “Mouse Heaven,” one fan’s collection/shrine in Beacon, New York. Great animators from the late Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” to Andreas Deja and Mark Henn and Eric Golberg, who animated and coordinated with other animators the “Mickey in a Minute” short film., weigh in on the character, whom we see being drawn, “inked” and animated. They break down the “personality” and character traits that come from the seemingly simple choice of how Disney and others decided he should walk (confident, bouncy, nimble enough to respond to any circumstance), react and interact with the world.

There’s also a lot of talk of the global phenomenon Mickey Mouse quickly became, his iconic status at home and abroad during World War II (fascists banned him), and the seeming simplicity of his design, just “a few circles,” that made him easily identifiable the world over and triggers such a loving response from literally billions of people, young and old.

A joke about what future archeologists might make of our worship of the mouse, an entire civilization’s “shrine to the Great God Mickey,” rings a lot truer that you’d think.

No, “The Story of a Mouse” doesn’t get definitive answers that cut through Walt’s penchant for “tall tales” about the Mouse’s origin, or avoid repeating Disney lore about this and that. It’s still an eye-opener, especially for the casual fan who hasn’t devoured all the many books on Early Disney as a subject and Mickey as a character, a corporate brand and a cultural touchstone.

Rating: G

Cast: Mark Henn, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, Mindy Johnson, Rachel Cline, Carmenita Higgenbotham, Bret Iwan, Floyd Norman and Walt Disney.

Credits: Directed by Jeff Malmberg. A Disney+ release.

Runing time: 1:30

We love Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds and Octavia Spencer. We all do, and I know I’m not speaking out of turn when I say “we” here.

And that’s a big help when diving into the musical “Spirited,” a musical “Christmas Carol” updating that uses “Scrooged” as its guiding star.

When Ferrell turns to the camera in the middle of singing “That Christmas Morning Feeling,” and flips us all the bird, that’s what they were going for here — juvenile, PG-13 “naughty” with an Oscar winner and two bromantic comedians not known for singing and dancing joining in on the singing and dancing.

So it’s a sort-of “family” musical with very dark and up to date undertones and a little edge, augmented by a smattering of profanity. Any thoughts of this being Ferrell’s follow-up to the sweeter-than-sweet modern holiday classic “Elf” go right out the door long before he’s flipped us all off.

The tunes have “Dear Evan Hansen,” “La La Land” and “Greatest Showman” composer/lyricist authorship. But the director, Sean Anders, who co-wrote it, did Ferrell’s “Daddy’s Home” buddy comedies with Mark Wahlberg. So no, he’s not known for musicals either.

And you just knew from the amusing, snappy trailers, promotional gags and the like that Reynolds and Ferrell have plunged intot o promote this that the movie wasn’t going to be as funny or as much fun as they promised. It isn’t.

But it starts giddy and finds a few moments to shine. The dancing and production numbers are close to dazzling. Reynolds, Ferrell and especially Spencer sing well enough that one listens for autotune touches and is tempted to look-up if they actually did their own singing. Yes. Yes they did.

And again, we LOVE those guys. So there’ll be no incineration of “Spirited” here. Everybody involved took a lot of Apple’s money and took career risks and they kind of, sort of pull it off.

Ferrell plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, a veteran in service of a sort of Santa’s Workshop as Silicon Valley cloud tech start-up that sets out to give one HOA Nazi/neighbor from Hell (Rose Byrne) or “rat bastard hotel manager” or other stinker that one Christmas night of “visits” that change them for the better each year.

Just like Mr. Scrooge.

Patrick Page is Jacob Marley, director of this operation, where they save-one-soul-at a-time and create “ripples” of kindness and righteousness through the culture. And yes, two screenwriters spent time on the clock coming up with all this logistical, expositional claptrap.

Reynolds plays Clint, a nasty, negative-ad mastering media consultant deemed “unredeemable” by the higher ups. But Mr. Christmas Present insists they try, joined by Christmas Past (Sunita Mani) who can’t keep her tongue in her mouth while lapping up all there is to see of the handsome, flippant and shallow Clint.

Christmas Future? He’s voiced by Tracy Morgan and is as tall and scary as the Specter of Death Itself. He scares the hell out of Karen (Byrne) anyway. Great effect.

Can Clint, who introduces himself by singing to a Christmas Tree Growers’ convention that they’re doomed, but that he can negative advertise them back to glory, be saved?

“Every Facebook loving Boomer wants to fight a culture war,” he croons. “So tell your core consumer what the hell they’re fighting for!”

Clint even wants to help his neglected eighth grade niece (Marlowe Barkley) win her school election by “going negative.” He puts his ace executive vice president (Spencer) on the case doing the oppo research that will destroy young Josh’s candidacy.

Past, Present and Future set out to change Clint, who is so snide and cynical that he makes them question why they even bother. “People are selfish and awful and never change” is what has made him rich, after all.

“Is mankind getting any mankinder” thanks to their efforts?

He’s got a point.

“Spirited” wanders hither and yon, with clever effect/set changes to show Clint flashbacks to his troubled childhood, and early career success. He even persuades his “Present” guide to go back to Dickensian English where the guide-ghost was last alive himself, producing an “Oliver!” styled number in an English eatery and pub that is the musical, costume and dancing highlight of the film. Of course they reference “Oliver!” in it. They know what they’re mocking as well as we do.

Spencer sings a soul-searching ballad or two and Ferrell and Reynolds share some song and dance duets that are delightful, if you give yourself over to them as musicals demand that you do. I got a “Dear Evan Hansen” instantly forgettable vibe from most of them.

When pondering why this wasn’t taking flight more often, I settled on how produced, rehearsed and directed a musical has to be, and how warm and loose and adorable those online bits that Reynolds and Ferrell come off. They’re played as throw-away gags, and no matter how scripted and rehearsed his fake feud with Hugh Jackman might be, Reynolds and Jackman make it seem like effortless comical antipathy.

“Spirited” it too long, self-serious and tidy to feel that spontaneous and goofy.

But it’s novel and kind of cute cute, and when it isn’t you just grit your teeth and recall how morbid “A Christmas Carol” really is, and if the screenplay is going to modernize that, death and the unpleasant facts of modern life are fair game, Jimmy Fallon cameo included.

The best idea here is but a single sequence, those singing and dancing Dickensians insulting each other with a phrase the movie insists we’ve twisted away from the profane put-down it was 200 years ago.

“Good afternoon!”

So there’s just enough novelty and fun to recommend “Spirited” — something I’ve never done for the sour “Scrooged” — with Reynolds and Ferrell hoofing and singing like this is what they’ve wanted to do all their professional lives.

And it’s just off-color enough to encourage 12 year-old boys to laugh at hearing their playground profanity thrown back at them, sending them back to school with fresh insults that this time, at least, won’t make their teachers blush.

“Good afternooon!”

Rating: PG-13 for (profanity), some suggestive material and thematic elements.

Cast: Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, Octavia Spencer, Sunita Mani, Tracy Morgan, Patrick Page, Joe Tippett, Andrea Anders, Marlowe Barkley and Rose Byrne

Credits: Directed by Sean Anders, scripted by Sean Anders and John Morris. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:06

The opening scene of “Wild is the Wind” is a routine traffic stop that is anything but routine.

A sketchy-looking speeder has been pulled overon a lonely road somewhere on the Veldt. Two South African cops — one white, one black — are taking care of this. Money changes hands, and a fervent promise to never speed again is given in exchange.

The black cop pockets his share of the money as the ancient Datsun leaves. When we see the smirking driver, we also see what the cop had to have seen, a bound and gagged black woman in the back seat. Apparently that didn’t matter. Both men in blue have let money get between them and justice, between them and doing the bare minimum in “Protect and Serve” terms.

This could be good, we think. Pointed and timely. Or not.

Writer-director Fabian Medea’s film then proceeds to tell us and teach them the consequences of racism and the corruption it leads to when it infects law enforcement. Because “three years later,” a pretty white teenager disappears. She’s the mayor’s niece, so there’ll be “hell to pay” if the killer isn’t caught.

White South Africa is sure the killer was “some kaffir” from “the township.” But these two dirty cops — well, one of them most certainly — know better.

Mothusi Magano is Vusi, the black sergeant in that duo, married with a baby on the way. Frank Rautenbach is John, his superintendent and expert in the one thing law enforcement the world over is most expert in — knowing what he and they can get away with. That’ll come in handy as he needs money just as badly as Vusi. He’s trying to save the family ranch.

They’ve moved on from petty bribes to carrying out off-the-books drug raids. Local mobster/club owner Mongo (Brendon Daniels) will always take the merchandise off their hands.

But now there’s this murder investigation that could muck everything up. For Vusi, who has nightmares about the killer he is sure he let go for a few South African rand years before, it’s also a reckoning, his moment of truth.

Medea’s police parable benefits from striking locations, solid performances and a built-in ticking clock. Can the two cops serve two masters, and keep their corruption out of the public eye while scrambling to solve or appear to solve this case before racial tensions explode? Are they “brothers” in blue, or does race trump that? They’ll have to visit a bar with Nazi decor, grill and beat this suspect and then than one.

On the sliding “brisk” to “tediously slow” scale of screen pacing, “Wild is the Wind” sits somewhere between “deliberate” and “get ON with it, man.” It’s slow. It dawdles, with the odd dead-end scene mixed in with scripted character back stories and details from what happened “that night” from various suspects’ point of view.

We’ve seen the opening scene. We know who did it. So does Vusi. His nightmares underscore this, and the fact that he’s damned if he does the right thing for once, damned if he doesn’t.

Medea doesn’t do a very good job of running through the calculations the cops have to be making about this case, their financial situation and conflicting loyalties. Medea handles the murderous subject matter glibly at times and can’t reconcile the moral quicksand his characters slow-walk through, no matter how far towards “simple vengeance tale” he takes this.

This was potentially a timely, politically-charged thriller sure to pack a punch. Blows are landed, and characters are triggered. We get a sense of how an integrated police force struggles to deliver justice when haste and bribes and deep-seeded racism convince this black cop or that black coroner that “justice” has never been the way things work there.

As this tame “Wind” meanders towards whatever inevitable conclusion among the three we can see coming long before the finale, all we’re left with is what might have been.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity, drug and alcohol abuse

Cast: Mothusi Magano, Frank Rautenbach, Brendon Daniels and Izel Bezuidenhout

Credits: Scripted and directed by Fabian Medea. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

“Byzantine” is the word we use to describe insanely-complicated and sometimes murderously murky political situations. But the literal back-stabbers of the Eastern Roman Empire had nothing on the mess that was Korean politics during South Korea’s dictatorships, coups and assassinations era, the late 1970s and early ’80s.

“Squid Games” star Lee Jung-jae has conjured up a seriously over-the-top, byzantine, violent and fictional thriller inspired by those wild and bloody times. He wrote, directed and stars in “Hunt,” a chaotic and engrossing mystery built around that evergreen of the espionage and political intrigue genre, the hunt for a “mole” in Korean intelligence agencies.

Notice I used the plural there. God knows how many entities and their legions of field agents cross paths and cross swords (not literally) in this veritable civil war among competing agendas between rivals with competing suspicions.

Lee stars as Park Pyong-ho, a top level agent with the KCIA when we meet him. It’s not until he’s present at an attempted assassination of his country’s increasingly dictatorial and murderously repressive president during a visit to Washington that he crosses paths with his domestic security counterpart, Major Kim (Jung Woo-sung).

That attempted-hit on the president and assorted other operations that are lethally compromised tell both men, and their higher-ups, that this “mole” they’ve been wondering about is real. They cannot accept this or that fall guy that the thoroughly corrupt government, whose corruption leaks into every agency in it, puts forth.

As each plunges into the arrests, brutal interrogations and spy games with North Korean agents and defectors to find and catch the spy in their ranks, each has plenty of good, solid reasons to suspect the other of being the mole, or helping cover that mole’s activities.

Lee scripts and stages epic shootouts and attempted hits in D.C., Seoul and Tokyo as each agent, moving further up the ladder, engages in tit-for-tat reprisals and provocations in their game of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” with each other.

Lee makes Park the hotter of these two hotheads, the one that bellows the most credible threats and the quickest to resort to violence. But Park is troubled by what all this means to the safety and stability of his country even as he ruthlessly orders this or personally carries out that. Jung plays the more guarded and in some ways, the more frightening character, the one who won’t hesitate to do what he thinks needs to be done.

Go Yoon-Jung plays a college girl caught up in campus protests against the fascist regime, a young woman Park keeps getting out of jail. “Honey trap,” the other spies wonder. And “He’s not my father,” she explains. Another mystery to puzzle out.

One thing I’m often struck by in Korean action cinema is the sheer human scale of the productions. It’s not just the zombie movies that are filled with teeming masses. Lee treats us to huge, crowded protests broken up by legions of savagely motivated riot police, competing armies of agents trying to shove past each other to access this official or that wounded agent with secrets they need, fighting to get into his hospital room.

Chaos and mayhem are all around as the manipulative U.S. CIA section chief (Paul Battle) emphasizes that America’s limited concerns are “stability,” and no so much how South Korea achieves it.

One of Park’s field recruits tells him a joke (in Korean, with English subtitles). What do you call war in space?

“Star Wars.”

What do you call a war that never quite turns hot?

“Cold War.”

And what’s the name for a war without end?

“Korean War!”

It’s so — here’s that word — “Byzantine” that “Hunt” can be a tad hard to follow. But even that adds to its immersive qualities. Hand-held cameras plunging into brawls, tear gas, chasing assassins and North Korean spies from dead drops to booby-trapped hideaways, the viewer is overwhelmed much the way ordinary Koreans must have been back then and to some degree, even now, with an armed if starving neighbor to their north bent on their destruction.

But that’s what life amid Byzantine intrigues is like.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence and lots of it

Cast: Lee Jung-jae, Jung Woo-sung, Jeon Hye-jin and Go Yoon-Jung

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lee Jung-jae. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:06

Back in the ’80s, I was helping my “sourdough” housemates set up for a poker game in a place I rented up Kodiak, Alaska way.

And then “Breaking Away” came on the satellite dish TV. As I settled in to watch it, I started talking it up. One by one, the other guys finished what that they were doing and joined in. None of them had seen it.

Other players arrived, wound-up and ready for some poker and a few Kodiak “slammers,” (tequila and 7-Up and don’t get me started on that). But they started watching, too. Whatever this 1979 Peter Yates dramedy holds for women, or members of minority groups unrepresented on the screen in those less diverse times, for blue collar white guys, it was instant nostalgia in its day, cinematic comfort food about paths taken and not taken, the endless possibilities of youth and the limits of small town — even a college town — life.

After the film ended and the drinking and money-losing started, I noticed how everybody’d picked up catch phrases.

Have a snack. ” It’s I-ty food. I don’t want no I-ty food.”

A straight, Jack high. MY pot. “Refund? REFUND!”

People tuned in to this minor hit’s magic right from the start. I remember Midwesterner Roger Ebert raving up this tale of Bloomington, Indiana on his TV show when “Breaking Away” came out. And as the years passed the nostalgia for a nostalgic-when-it-was-new movie endured. Entertainment Weekly did a cute cover story with the four young actors it helped launch — Dennis Christopher, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley and Dennis Quaid — 35 years later posing for a shot in their “Cutters” shirts.

Looking at it now, it’s obvious that even what it was selling back then was a sort of romantic, idealized and alcohol-free vision of white male post-high school youth, and perhaps it was set in still-seriously-segregated Indiana for a reason. Because that helped sell it.

But four sons of stone-cutting quarry workers, men who’d given their kids some piece of the middle class life with their labor, struggling to figure out what to do with the extra choices their parents passed on to them, that story still resonates as it always did. It’s still magical.

Christopher plays Dave Stohler, 19ish and utterly obsessed with cycling. This was pre-Greg LeMond, pre-US TV coverage of the Tour de France. A few different-drum kids of that era got into bicycle racing (including me), but Dave has gone off the deep end. He’s so into “The Italians” who battled the French and Belgians for dominance of the sport back then that he’s learning Italian, speaking Italian to his indulgent mother (Barbara Barrie) and utterly dismayed Dad, played by the great Paul Dooley.

Buon giorno, papa!

“I’m not “papa.” I’m your god-damned father. She’s your god-damned mother…That’s MY cat! His name’s Jake, not Fellini! I won’t have any “eenie” in this house!”

Dave’s only got room for one obsession at a time, so his life is as aimless as his running mates. Mike (Quaid, in his break-out performance) used to be a jock and is facing 20 with the growing knowledge that his best years and most of his possibilities are behind him. Cyril (Stern) is a quizzical wit who might not be witty enough to compete with the real wits at college, should he try to get in. And Moocher (Haley) is short, short-tempered and barely keeping it together, living on his own in a house his father’s trying to sell from Chicago, where the old man is job hunting. Moocher may have to settle down to get even the tiniest taste of security. He’s touchy about that, too

Over the course of this late summer/early school year, they’ll tangle with snobby Indiana U. college kids, who look down their noses at “cutters.” They’ll swim in an abandoned quarry, goof around and hang as “the four musketeers” as long as they can. They’ll support Dave’s cycling dream. Dave will fall in love with a coed (Robyn Douglas at her most winsome) and trick her into thinking he’s an Italian exchange student.

Eyes will open, idealism will fade or change course and dialects. And they’ll race as a team at the Indiana University Little 500, a fraternity system relay race with bicycles sprinting around a running track.

Great films burn themselves into the memory selectively. It’s scenes and sketches of characters we remember. Director Yates — who also did “Bullitt,” for Pete’s sake — scores Dave’s cycling moments to Felix Mendelsohn’s “Italian Symphony,” including one thrilling bit where the kid is drafting behind a highway trucker. Dave serenades Kathy, aka “Katerina,” with an aria, “M’appari Tutt’s Amor” from Flotow’s opera “Martha.” Cyril hilariously accompanies Dave on guitar, but that doesn’t break the spell this scene casts.

A generation of guys learned the value of the Big Romantic Gesture from that moment.

In the years since first seeing the film, on a single screen at the Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg, Va. (another college town, a lot like Bloomington), I’ve never turned down the opportunity to interview any of its principals.

Stern expanded on his comical/quizzical turn to become the voice of “The Wonder Years” and a menace on “Home Alone.” The last time I interviewed Quaid was for “The Rookie,” as he traveled full circle back to being the convincing jock he’d been on screen just starting out.

Haley, a scene-stealer as the All World tween jock of “The Bad News Bears,” became a generational icon of a different stripe, a fanboy and fangirl favorite thanks to “Watchmen” (the movie, which he also stole) and a turn as Freddy Krueger in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” reboot. We joked about how, of all the guys in “Breaking Away,” he was the most natural looking on a bike, even if it was over-sized for him. Yeah, the shortest guy in the film was the real jock. And a badass.

One thing that collectively stands out about this crew is how well Yates cast them. You can see Christopher getting the hang of the bike as the film progresses, never quite mastering “form.” But they mesh and make us believe they’ve been friends forever, and that their time together is destined to end.

Yugoslav immigrant Steve Tesich, who scripted “Eyewitness” and “The World According to Garp,” as well as the cycling drama “American Flyer,” tapped into a lot of Americana and Midwestern land grant university truisms here. But his European point of view brought cycling into the story and to America’s heartland, destined to become home to the first U.S. riders to gain glory in the sport in the ’80s and ’90s — LeMond from Wisconsin, Andrew Hampstead from North Dakota, where I took classes in grad school from his mother.

The label “classic film” can be a consensus view, as “Breaking Away” is, or a wholly personal one. It’s easy to imagine whole generations not tuning in to its wavelength, not relating to its white, Midwestern college/townie nostalgia. But the bones it is built on are universal — post-high school ennui, confusion, seeing the limits of your life for the first time, losing yourself in “escape” and self-delusion, dating over your head.

Transplant “Breaking Away” to the Latino southwest or Asian Northwest or an urban African American environment, find some obsession to take the place of bicycle racing, and the themes, teen angst and comradery would still resonate. The generational “I want you to do better than me” messaging translates into any culture. We see a bit of “Breaking Away” in the derivative recent coming-of-age drama “Armageddon Time,” about growing up working class Jewish in New York, for instance.

That’s what makes a classic.

The lifelong passions it engendered for some of us — bicycles, Mendelssohn and movies with Big Romantic Gestures? Those are just a bonus.

Rating: PG, a fistfight, profanity and smoking

Cast: Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Robyn Douglas, Daniel Stern, Barbara Barrie, Jackie Earle Haley and Paul Dooley.

Credits: Directed by Peter Yates, scripted by Steve Tesich. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:41