Four movies are out this week: local ghosts, US animated Christmas, Spanish animated extra-terrestrial planet and auteur movie on friendship are on the menu. Enjoy!

• FANTASMA DE BUENOS AIRES. Distributed by a major — which bespeaks the distributors’ confidence in it, at least as regards box office attraction — Fantasma de Buenos Aires, directed by Guillermo Grillo and starring Estanislao Silveyra and Iván Espeche, is the sixth feature-length movie entirely produced by the Fundación Universidad del Cine, the cradle of the so-called “New Argentine Cinema”. Fantasma de Buenos Aires has something in common with the series’ first production — Moebius (1996), with directorial supervision by Gustavo Mosquera — both approach the genre known, in literature, as cuento fantástico, but this is where Fantasma..., wisely enough, diverts its course to tread on the territory of the most difficult of genres: comedy.
The combination is immensely arduous and complex, and a true challenge, from script to final product. And yet director Guillermo Grillo, who also wrote Fantasma...’s intelligent screenplay, pulls off a fantasy/horror/comedy movie that, without having read the script, surely fulfills the author’s every design.
The point of departure for such an accomplished piece is the process of writing and rewriting until a shooting script is finished with no cracks or crevices in it. Granted, the first ten minutes of Grillo’s script and its transposition to the language of filmare rather feeble: “Ooohhh, please, not another post-teen resurrection or copycat of much hyped products like The Blair Witch Project. One sighs with relief when it becomes apparent that Fantasma... deviates from the conventions of the horror genre to develop a striking, effective blend the recipe of which only the screenwriter-director is fully capable of putting together, pulling the strings of every character, every single scene, every single twist of this seamless narrative artifact.
Fantasma... plunges head-on into the trite, overplayed and overused scene of a group of people sitting around a Ouija board, playfully but also but also in a frightened, disturbed mood as to what the outcome will be. They conjure up a spirit but, scared to death as they all are, save for the incredulous Tomás (Estanislao Silveyra), they give the game up, fold the Ouija board and put it away. Things really start to go awry when the ghost they’ve conjured up through the Ouija board and a glass manages to escape his eternal, invisible perambulations to sort of materialize before the eyes of, precisely, Tomás, the most reasonable guy in the whole bunch.
(Argentina, 2009, in Spanish). Written and directed by: Guillermo Grillo. Produced by: Mario Santos and Fundación Universidad del Cine. With: Estanislao Silveyra, Iván Espeche, Ana Celentano, Lisandro Rodríguez. Distribution Company. NR. Running time: 94 minutes.

• A CHRISTMAS CAROL 3D (LOS FANTASMAS DE SCROOGE 3D). Yet another film adaptation of Charles Dickens' story, this time with computer animation built upon live actors (as in Beowulf and The Polar Express), with Jim Carey performing a multitude of roles and directed by Robert "Back to the Future" Zemeckis..
(US, 2009, in English and dubbed into Spanish) Directed by: Robert Zemeckis - Screenplay: Robert Zemeckis on a story by Charles Dickens - Voices of: Jim Carrey, Daryl Sabara, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Robin Wright Penn, Bob Hoskins - PG13 - Running time: 96 minutes.

• PLANET 51. A Spanish animated film (and the most expensive film in the history of Spanish cinema). Life in peaceful green planet inhabited by peaceful green people is altered by the invasion of an alien coming in his spaceship from a territfying planet: Earth.
(Spain/ UK/ US, 2009, in English and dubbed into Spanish) Directed by: Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad and Marcos Martínez - Written by: Joe Stillman - Voices of: Dwayne Johnson, Jessica Biel, Justin Long, Gary Oldman, Seann William Scott, John Cleese - G - Running time: 86 minutes.

• GOODBYE SOLO. An old man with a lifetime of regrets hires Solo, a Senegalese taxi driver, to take him to a peak - but does not ask for a ride back from the rock and is obviously depressed. They become friends. An independent film which won the international film critic's FIPRESCI award for best film at the Venice Festival.
(US, 2008, in English, French, Volofo and Spanish) Directed by: Ramin Bahrani - Written by: Bahareh Azimi and Ramin Bahrani - Featuring: Souleymane Sy Savane, Red West, Diana Franco Galindo, Lane ‘Roc‘ Williams, Mamadou Lam, Carmen Leyva - PG13 - Running time: 91 minutes.

• Tango-lover phantom in the 21st century