"X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" aren't the only movies opening today. Two foreign films, along with an animated sci-fi adventure, also arrive in theaters.

The map of Central America and Mexico includes a sliver of the United States. So, when Honduran teen Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) asks about her ultimate destination of New Jersey, the state is nowhere to be found.

It might as well be on another planet; it seems that unreachable for the Hondurans headed to Mexico and, ultimately, the States by any means possible.

Sayra, her father and an uncle hop freight trains and ride atop them. As if their journey wasn't perilous enough, they become targets of murderous Mexican gang members who see the illegals as ripe for the picking -- and plundering.

That is how director Cary Joji Fukunaga brings his twin storylines together, as if with the clash of cymbals. The more harrowing strand involves gang warfare, the initiation of a 12-year-old boy whose shell and heart harden before our eyes and acts considered unforgivable and punishable by death.

This sets "Sin Nombre" apart from "El Norte" or "Maria Full of Grace," two of the most vivid movies ever released about the illegal immigrant experience.

Fukunaga, who made a short film about an abandoned truckload of immigrants who suffocated in Texas, researched this story in Mexican jails, along river banks where rafts transport the hopeful early in their journey, on trains targeted by bandits and in shelters housing people whose limbs were sliced off along the rails.

While 1983's "El Norte" was hailed for its poetic style, the bracing "Sin Nombre" plays like a documentary, shot through with doom, danger and the siren call of a better life in the States. But you may suspect, from the start, that not everyone, or perhaps anyone, may make it to the promised land.

Opens today at the Manor Theater.

Rated R for violence, language and some sexual content. In Spanish with English subtitles.

'Everlasting Moments'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

Anyone who learned to develop photos the old-fashioned way (with trays of pungent chemical solutions, coated paper and rubber-tipped tongs) might share the sentiment expressed here.

Watching an image blossom on the paper floating in the darkroom tray, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) says, "It's a miracle." In early 20th-century Sweden, it certainly seemed that way.

Maria had won a small Contessa camera but tucked it out of sight. It seems her only hope for a little bit of money after her dying father insists she stay with her husband, striking dock worker Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt), no matter how much he drinks, chases women or hits her or their children.

A kindly professional photographer and studio owner (Jesper Christensen) insists Maria try the camera before selling it and is astonished at her eye. "Not everyone is endowed with the gift of seeing."

An ancestor of director Jan Troell's wife, a poor working-class mother of seven named Maria, inspired the story. "Everlasting Moments" doesn't so much end as hit pause; the characters' lives continue on without us.

As Maria's brood grows, her options for escape shrink although the camera proves a monetary and emotional lifeline. Like a photographer toying with depth of field, Troell uses the Larssons to illuminate the living, working and social conditions in Sweden and he, too, has the gift of seeing.

Opens today at the Manor.

Not rated but PG-13 in nature for infidelity, drinking, violence and other disturbing scenes. In Swedish with English subtitles.

'Battle for Terra'

2 stars = Mediocre
Ratings explained

This is one of the oddest movies to come along in some time.

In 3-D in some theaters, it's an animated sci-fi adventure about a planet called Terra that becomes targeted by nomadic Earthlings who have exhausted the resources of their planet and a couple of others. Terra is where spunky alien creature Mala (who looks like an evolved, big-eyed tadpole) lives and quietly rebels.

When Mala's father is abducted, she secretly defies the elders and nurses a human pilot named Jim back to health and eventually gets a glimpse of his world. When a war-mongering general executes a plot to wipe out the Terrians, Jim's friendship with Mala and his decency are tested.

Evan Rachel Wood speaks for Mala and Luke Wilson for Jim, with Brian Cox, Justin Long, Dennis Quaid, James Garner and other recognizable actors lending their voices, too.

"Battle," directed by the Montreal-born Aristomenis Tsirbas, comes with some nifty and ordinary 3-D effects and mature messages about free thinkers, conservation, peace, finding common ground with enemies, avoiding torture and sacrificing for the larger good. And for the budding fans of action movies, it has a fiery, explosive battle.

It seems like a couple of movies (for different age groups) rolled into one, with whiffs of E.T., robot sidekicks, square-jawed heroes and feisty females. But the 91-minute movie may be a bit like the Earthlings who are in search of a home or, here, audience.

Rated PG for sequences of science-fiction action violence and some thematic elements.