The Visitor 2007

In The Station Agent, writer/director Tom McCarthy threw together three mismatched souls and found incandescence in their quiet journeys towards redemption. In The Visitor, he does it again, painting his gentle, soulful colours against a canvas of global strife. Economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is the shy, disillusioned male at the centre of McCarthy's ensemble piece, who returns to his New York apartment after a long absence to find it occupied by a couple of illegal immigrants. Convivial Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) is a talented drummer who encourages Walter out of his protective shell, while his prickly girlfriend Zainab (Danai Gurira) carries the burden of their perilous citizenship status. Each learns something new from the other, but just when you think you have this film pinned, it takes off in an unexpectedly dramatic and moving direction. The arrival of Tarek's mother Mouna (played by luminous Israeli-Arab actress Hiam Abbass) has something to do with this, but so too does the playing out of remote political realities on an intimate human scale. — BZ

"As a writer-director, McCarthy, like the characters and the places that he suffuses with emotion, has poetry in him - and he knows how to let it out. He has a talent for demarcating those spaces in which characters can become whoever they want to be... There isn't a cliched or unfelt moment in The Visitor. Poet Robert Burns may have written that the greatest gift is to see ourselves as others see us. But McCarthy knows the greatest thing is to see yourself truly and whole, and to offer whatever is worthy to your loved ones and your friends." — Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun