With the gloriously deadpan comedies 25 Watts and Whisky, co-writers and directors Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll were the leading lights of Uruguayan cinema, not exactly heading the kind of renaissance seen in other Latin American countries in the 2000s – the country’s industry is miniscule – but certainly making two of the region’s most idiosyncratic films. Then Rebella killed himself, a tragedy that threw his friend into a grief that seemed to end his career also.

The title couldn’t be more resonant, as the economic crisis makes the one-time First World visibly slip another notch. But in Tony Krawitz’s adaptation of Christos Tsolkias’s novel, the meaning is also literal: this is a bloody continent of unquiet ghosts.

From the makers of Little Miss Sunshine comes a funny, ethereal love story in the same vein as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Sunshine’s not all they have in common.

As Julian Assange continues to hold the world’s authorities at bay behind embassy doors, this new biopic offers Young Assange: a Melbourne teenager among the first generation of computer hackers, who cracked the Pentagon’s code on the Gulf War’s eve.

Argentine Celina Murga’s two feature films to date, Ana and the Others and A Week Alone, mark her out as one of the most original voices in a country chock full of talent.  Those films are concerned with individuals – respectively, a young woman and a group of children – in search of an identity, in a society that is giving them little direction. Her first documentary, Escuela normal, investigates this question at source.

Often portrayed as corrupt or, at best, on the front line of a war zone, the officers of the LAPD are regulars on the big and small screen. On TV, Southland and The Shield have examined the LAPD in microscopic detail and earlier this year Rampart intermittently impressed with its focus on one cop in freefall. With police procedural End of Watch writer-director David Ayer is on home turf: he’s the man behind several LA-set police thrillers, including Training Day (for which he penned the screenplay).

Through a haunted forest and entered by a secret doorway is Dracula's castle - but this isn't where virgins are deflowered by the Transylvanian count; rather it's where he, a widower, dotes on his daughter and runs a hotel for his his monster mates. Hotel Transylvania is where Frankenstein's Monster and his wife Eunice, Wayne and Wanda Werewolf, the Invisible Man and all manner of ghouls and ghosties go for their holidays to take refuge from those nasty humans outside.

This week a holy relic has gone on show in the British Library. The continuous scroll of the original manuscript of On the Road is a kind of ur-artefact of the Beat Generation. Typed up by Jack Kerouac in three weeks in April 1951, and 120 feet long, it underpins a central myth of the Beats: that a tight-knit counter-cultural post-war generation of young American writers were powered by nothing but inspiration (plus of course pills, nicotine and booze). They wrote the way jazzers performed - free-wheelingly, in the moment, without regard for the piffling orthodoxy of structure.

For Darcey Bussell it’s Baryshnikov in The Turning Point; for Carlos Acosta it’s The Red Shoes. No one at last week's starry premiere of Love Tomorrow at the Raindance Film Festival, when I asked them for their favourite dance film, mentioned Black Swan. Films about the ballet life are rareties - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the curtains and OTT fantasies?

Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio should see an uptick in admissions on the back of Liberal Arts. The wan cross-generational love story was shot on the invitingly leafy grounds of a campus whose alumni over time have included E L Doctorow, Paul Newman and this very film's own co-star, Alison Janney. But if the place looks lovely, the people decidedly don't. One's best advice for Elizabeth Olsen, who walks off with the film playing a lovestruck undergrad, is to get out - and fast.