Six years after the termination of the TV series (ten years after the mid-run movie), we find that Mulder the Believer and Scully the Skeptic have cut all ties to the FBI, the latter now a practicing physician at Our Lady of Sorrows, the former in retirement as a bearded hermit. The case that draws them back into the fold is not all that far out of this world, not all that far out of the workaday police procedural: an abducted female FBI agent and a pedophiliac defrocked priest who might or might not be psychic. The scope of the crime grows exponentially when another woman goes missing and the psychic uncovers a major cache of body parts preserved in ice, and the trail ultimately will lead to some macabre mad-scientist experiments well worthy of allusion to Dr. Frankenstein. Yet we’re still a long way short of manifestations of extraterrestrial life or supernatural entities. And that’s a relief. This modest entertainment, under the authoritative direction of series creator Chris Carter, has plenty of speed and stamina; it has palpable suspense; it has honest shocks; and it has a unifying and a resonating theme of perseverance: Mulder in his lifelong pursuit of the Truth that, in a watchword of the series, Is Out There (way, way out there), Scully in her quotidian treatment of a terminally ill child, the ex-priest in his quest for redemption, and even the villains in the lengths to which they’re prepared to go in their self-serving villainy. (New watchword: Don’t Give Up.) Though you might almost wish that the movie had wiped the slate clean and started over with baggage-free characters, the passing years have added an attractive weariness, a romantic Weltschmerz, to the two lead actors, especially to Gillian Anderson (“I’m done chasing monsters in the dark” — done, too, covering up the beauty spot below her left nostril), who was always the more attractive to begin with. But even the supercool David Duchovny — an odd temperature for an ardent believer — appears to have gained a deeper layer of awareness, or else dropped an outer layer of vanity. Their mutual mission now looks like more a curse than a crusade. Where once their lodestar might have been Prometheus, at present it’s Sisyphus. With Billy Connolly and Amanda Peet. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd