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Writer/director Alejandro Agresti’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale builds a glum, dysfunctional world around a hopeful eight-year-old boy growing up in Buenos Aires in the late ’60s. As played by Rodrigo Noya, his title hero overcomes these obstacles and wins over the audience with his resilience, knowing glances, and wistful voiceovers. Valentín dreams of becoming an astronaut, and his biggest obstacles to success seem at first to be his crossed eyes, his boxy spectacles, and his controlling grandmother (Carmen Maura). Later, the absence of his parents, at first a matter of curiosity, grows into something more ominous. Valentín’s father (played by Agresti), it turns out, is a womanizing, abusive sod. He asks the boy to spend an afternoon with his new girlfriend, Leticia (Julieta Cardinali), a babe in go-go boots; what follows is a manipulative, nostalgic ode to lost childhood that succeeds largely on the strength of its pint-sized star. In Spanish with English subtitles. (86 minutes)