The Visitor (2007)

In the first scene of this movie, a fifty-something widower named Walter quits his fifth piano teacher and sells his piano. His buttoned-up and boring life as an economics professor in Connecticut has flat-lined emotionally. In the final scene, Walter's grooving on an African drum in the underground of the New York City subway. Formulaic, far-fetched, even predictable? You'll have to decide, but many critics have loved this film. When Walter is forced to present a paper in NYC, he returns to an apartment he owns there, only to discover two squatters from Senegal and Syria. But they are more than mere squatters for several important reasons, and how their stories intersect form the plot of this movie and the reason why Walter found authenticity in his life after admitting that for so very long he had "only been pretending."