The Visitor was the first movie I saw at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and as it turns out it was also one of the best. It’s also Tom McCarthy’s followup to The Station Agent, an amazing, overlooked little gem from 2003.
In The Visitor, the great Richard Jenkins stars as a disillusioned Connecticut economics professor named Walter Vale, whose life is change by a chance encounter in New York City. The film’s first trailer has popped up online, watch it here.
In its best moments, the film is a celebration of the transformative power of music, as elderly, worn down Walter learns the drums from an energetic and likable illegal immigrant, and the trailer does its best to highlight that. It’s also a meditation on the issue of immigration, and though that’s only lightly touched on in the trailer. Read my Festival review of the film in our archive.
