Listings for Friday, May 16, through Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Visitor

Capsule by J.R. Jones

From the Chicago Reader

Richard Jenkins, the balding, bespectacled character actor best known as the ghostly father on HBO's Six Feet Under, gets the role of a lifetime in this powerful second film by writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent). A middle-aged economics professor grappling with the death of his wife, Jenkins travels to New York to deliver a paper and arrives at the apartment they'd kept there for years and finds an immigrant African couple (Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira) have been conned into renting the place. The professor's growing friendship with the man, a Syrian-born percussionist, begins to pull him out of the shell, but then the musician's busted and sent to a deportation center in Queens. The irony is overwhelming and yet somehow muted: Jenkins's professor is learning to open himself up again in a country that's closing itself down. With Hiam Abbass. PG-13, 103 min.

This movie is currently playing at: Century 12 and CineArts 6 | Landmark's Century Centre | Renaissance Place | River East 21

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