Sebastian Cordero’s “Cronicas” is a terrific movie for the enjoyment of which it helps to have a strong stomach. But if you can take yet another cinematic serial killer – albeit one without any of the lurid qualities of his Hollywood prototype – you will find in this picture a brilliant meditation on the relationship between storytelling and “truth.”

This is not immediately evident, because the film presents us with an example of its subject, namely the power of narrative, and especially familiar narrative, to distort reality. We think we know what serial-killer movies are like. Moreover, this one is also placed in the context of another familiar movie theme – a critique of unscrupulous media folk. But nothing is quite as we expect it to be nor is it so divergent from expectation that we realize this until the end. Like the journalists in the movie, we, too, are victims of the human desire for a good story.

John Leguizamo stars as Manolo Bonilla, a rising journalistic star with a Miami-based Spanish-language show called “One Hour With the Truth.” He and Ivan (Jose Maria Yazpik), his cameraman, travel with their producer, Marisa (Leonor Watling), to Babahoyo, Ecuador, to investigate a killer of children known as “The Monster,” who is terrorizing a rural community.

Marisa is the young and pretty wife of the show’s anchorman, Victor (Alfred Molina), who appears in the film only on television monitors. There is an obvious sexual tension between her and Manolo from the start, and the paradigmatic idea of the young lion seeking to depose the patriarch and claim its mate reinforces our sense of the jungle savagery into which villagers and press alike are descending.

Manolo and company arrive in the aftermath of the discovery of a mass grave of the Monster’s victims. The local community is hysterical with grief as the children are being given a funeral when into town drives a Bible salesman called Vinicio Cepeda (Damian Alcazar).

Vinicio’s pickup accidentally knocks down and kills the twin brother of one of the victims, who is also his parents’ only remaining child. In a frenzy, the boy’s father, Don Lucho (Henry Layana), falls upon the hapless Vinicio, beating him savagely and setting him on fire as a mob cheers him on. Vinicio is sure to be killed, but Manolo rescues him, delivering him to the harried local police Captain Rojas (Camilo Luzuriaga), who locks both him and Don Lucho up.

Other prisoners help Don Lucho attack Vinicio again, and the latter, fearing for his life, asks his savior, Manolo, to help him again by doing a television segment on his case. Manolo at first refuses, but Vinicio hints he has information that might lead Manolo and his crew to the Monster. In exchange for this information, and with dreams of journalistic glory dancing before his eyes, Manolo agrees. The segment is pitched as a tale of unjust imprisonment, for what could only have been an accident, of an innocent victim of mob violence.

Soon, however, Manolo is persuaded that Vinicio himself is the killer. He seems to know things that only the killer could know, including the location of an as-yet undiscovered victim’s grave, and he speaks with a chilling familiarity of the Monster’s thoughts and feelings.

Vinicio’s story is that, in the course of his travels, he met a man who, under the influence of heavy drinking, confessed everything to him. As he answers the typical television reporter’s questions about why he does it and how he feels when he does it, Manolo senses that the drunken killer is a polite fiction, a way for Vinicio himself to unburden his conscience. He dreams of catching the Monster’s confession on camera.

It is not possible to say more without giving away the ending, which you will want to experience as intended, but it will already be clear that what we have here are two quite separate themes: the more familiar one of the self-corrupting power of the media, and the less familiar one of the equally dangerous power of a story, once it has been created, even over its creators. These two themes support one another in such a way as to deepen the film’s meaning and impact.

There is always something slightly facile about stories of corrupt journalists. Like Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” such movies tend to become the thing they are ostensibly satirizing, namely an exploitation of their audience’s prurient interest in violence or scandal. To say that journalists’ self-conceit as purveyors of truth makes them self-deluded does not tell us anything new. But to show us exactly how that self-delusion is created and how easily we may become victims of it ourselves is a truly rare thing.

***

“Cronicas” also provides an interesting commentary on “The Beautiful Country,” by Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland. Here is a movie where the story does most of the work, and the director seems, for the most part, to be trying to keep out of its way.

Mind you, it’s hard to see what else he could have done, for it is a very powerful story.

Binh (Damien Nguyen) is the Vietnamese son of an American GI father. Such children in postwar and communist Vietnam – an estimated 12,000 to 18,000 of them – were treated as Bui Doi, “less than dust.” Raised in the country by relatives until his late teens, Binh travels to Ho Chi Minh City in 1990 to find his mother, Mai (Chau Thi Kim Xuan).

Mai is working as a servant for a rich family who treat her abominably, and Binh finds that he has a little half brother, Tam (Tran Dang Quoc Thinh), probably the son of her employer. She finds Binh a job with her in “the big house,” but an accident soon makes it expedient for him to leave town. Mai gives him her small savings and bids him take Tam and go to America.

The two thus join the hundreds of thousands of boat people who fled Vietnam between the late 1970s and early 1990s and who, if they were not drowned, starved, or murdered by pirates first, usually ended up behind barbed wire in refugee camps in Malaysia or Hong Kong. Some eventually made it to America.

Binh’s story, then, is already a familiar one, and it is made more so by becoming a quest for his father – which long traditions of storytelling have made self-explanatory and no longer in need of further elucidation.

In addition to these well-traveled narrative pathways, the film sets down a third. For the various appalling experiences undergone by Binh and Tam and a young Chinese woman (Bai Ling) they meet in a Malaysian refugee camp have the look of being in a showcase – like “Beyond Borders,” the Angelina Jolie vehicle of a couple of years ago – designed to impress us with the seriousness of “the refugee problem.”

I’m afraid that all this familiarity rather overwhelms our attempts to get to know Binh as an individual. He is a brave and attractive figure, but he seems swept away on these three powerful narrative currents even more than he is on the treacherous waters of the South China Sea. He is as much an enigma at the end as the beginning.

The one moment where he comes alive happens after months of indentured servitude in New York, when Binh learns by chance of a U.S. government program that would have brought him to America for free, and by air. All his sufferings, in other words, have been unnecessary. Later, after Nick Nolte makes a late and rather unsatisfactory appearance as his long-lost father, Binh tells him that he has not had much trouble effecting their reunion.

That remark seems to me to redeem the whole film and make it worth seeing – and to suggest for just a moment the saving irony of a “Cronicas,” which has the power to subvert a set of oppressive narrative expectations.