A warm, honest human drama that is both uplifting in its portrayal of the human spirt and disturbing in its showcase of the paranoid socio-political climate of America .

Good - The Visitor (2008) – I’m not sure who the visitor actually was in the film. Could it be the Richard Jenkins character or the Syrian immigrant in the U.S. living illegally? Richard Jenkins plays a man who doesn’t seem to have lived yet. He’s in a job that he doesn’t see any future in. He does things that are not grounded in things he wants to do – one could say he’s a visitor in his own life. The Syrian immigrant is a visitor in this country who lives fully but has not established a place of his own to live that life. I liked this film for its serious subject matter, character developments, and likeable characters overall though I would’ve shaved about 15 minutes from this picture. The tour de force in this picture is the helplessness we feel tackling the “establishment”, especially when the establishment doesn’t consider an illegal immigrant human at all (quite shameful). Note: Richard Jenkins was nominated for best actor in the 2009 Oscars.