The results, for the most part, aren't pretty. The newly expanded Balseros, which adds an hour of footage to the previous film, is an even more compelling, if grimmer, work than the original.

The result is an unwieldy but still compelling look at the plight of immigrants wrapped in a thriller about black-market organ transplants.

Mostly honest in its portrayal of teen sexuality -- it exists, whether we like it or not -- but also offers up the troubling notion of teen pregnancy as romantic and magical.

The vilest film of the season.

Despite its contemporary-sounding anti-French cracks, could easily have been made 20 years ago.

One shallow film, that quickly returns to where it started: Zero.

Simple and austere, The Cuckoo also draws from the mysticism of tales of gnomes and other creatures who inhabit remote Nordic lands. It is that blend of reality with allegory that delivers the film's beauty and charm.

Fails to capture the anguish and struggles of an ultra-Orthodox Jew adapting to a more secular world as did Amos Gitai's Kadosh, a film this one sometimes brings to mind.

The film is weighted down by a dour sensibility at odds with the book's insouciant charm.

Here, finally, is a superhero movie your AP English teacher can enjoy.

An insufferably artsy, pretentious work, the sort of picture that gives art films a bad name.

A rollicking, jumbo-sized swashbuckler, awash in sword fights, cursed treasures, plank walkings and hurtling cannonballs. This stylish, rousing movie has been directed with refreshing levity and wit.

The result leaves the movie feeling like a one-note take on a complex subject.

Isn't much more than the tale of a ''bad'' guy getting in touch with his good side, as well as a love story that makes monster-loving little boys go ''yuck!'' And that's what's too bad about Sinbad.

Seductive, ultimately frustrating.

Call it a victory for sincerity and style: Despite its familiarity, Blonde 2 doesn't make you want to pull out your hair by its (touched-up) roots.

This is easily the funniest of the Terminator movies (although not, it should be stressed, the lightest). It is also the shortest and most compact.

But this smart, genuinely creepy movie also feels <I>real</I>, which is why its horrors hit so hard. Fans of the scary stuff, run, don't walk.

Isn't only the silliest, most ridiculous movie of the summer; it may also be the most flat-out fun.

A feather-light musical rushed into production to capitalize on American Idol-frenzy, is nothing more than an excuse to give the two leads several musical numbers, a la those Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello "Beach Blanket Bingo" movies, and with just about the same amount of substance, too.

Watching Wilson and Hudson toil thanklessly through this mess is more laborious than writing the Great American Novel. And a lot less lucrative.

The main problem with The Hulk, really, is that there isn't enough Hulk in it.

Lands with a thud right from its painfully unfunny prologue and maintains its plodding, exasperating course straight through to its car-chase-and-shootout finale.

There are frothy romantic comedies and then there is Jet Lag, a movie so thin it borders on nonexistence.

Plays like a colorful but inert timekiller that you might tolerate while dozing off in front of the TV, but only because you are too sleepy to reach for the remote control.

There is magic here, enough to make Whale Rider worthy of the audience-choice awards it has earned at film festivals worldwide.

This remarkable, continually surprising documentary turns out to be something far richer and more complex, closer in spirit to "Crumb," another devastating film about a family's gradual self-destruction.

A high tolerance for syrupy melodrama is required in order to enjoy Together.