Sixty-one year-old Richard Jenkins has made more than 50 movies since debuting in Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado (1985). You probably wouldn't know him by name, but he's become a familiar face in films by the Coen and Farrelly brothets and such TV outings as Six Feet Under. Finally, however, he has found a leading role to prove he's more than just another dependable character actor and he seizes his opportunity with unassuming assurance in Thomas McCarthy's engaging mid-life drama The Visitor.

Arriving in Manhattan to give a paper at NYU, Jenkins's milquetoast academic is surprised to find illegal immigrants Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira living in his apartment. He politely asks them to leave, but thinks better of his decision on realising that they have been duped by an unscrupulous con merchant and he quickly strikes up an unlikely friendship with Sleiman, who not only teaches him African drumming, but also takes him along to a mass busking session in Central Park. But just as Jenkins's soul is awakening, Sleiman is arrested on the subway and Jenkins forms a touching attachment to the Syrian's worried mother, Hiam Abbass, when she comes to New York in the hope of preventing his deportation. Despite losing some of its charm and momentum after the focus shifts on to Jenkins's second renaissance, this gentle questioning of the US's continued commitment to the Ellis Island promise is nevertheless an inspiring insight into cross-cultural kinship and a poignant reminder that it's never too late to begin living.

Mysterious detective Kenichi Matsuyama gets a second chance to snare the serial killer with a celestial chopping list in Shusuke Kaneko's lively sequel Death Note: The Last Name, as a second book of the dead lands in the lap of TV starlet Erika Toda, prompting a new crusade against crime and corruption. However, student Tatsuya Fujiwara (who was gifted the first tome by a punkish angel of death) is always one move ahead in a battle of wits whose intricacy and sheer high-concept lunacy makes this manga franchise so diverting.

Once again the scenario is too packed with exposition to squeeze in much action and the CGI effects lack sophistication. But the darkly comic tone adds to the tension as Fujiwara and Toda undergo isolation therapy to lure Matsuyama into a false sense of superiority and the resolution is suitably sombre.

Guy Maddin is cinema's master pasticheur and he's on wondrous form in My Winnipeg, a 'docu-fantasia' that blends fact and fiction with a reckless glee that irradiates the brilliant recreations of past film-making styles, from Soviet montage and the silent city symphony to Lotte Reiniger's silhouette animations and film noir.

Shifting between fury, regret and nostalgia, this reverie is as witty and moving as it's visually dazzling. Ann Savage - the star of Edgar G.Ulmer's classic 1945 film noir, Detour - excels as Maddin's domineering mother. But Maddin's experiment to understand the past by restaging incidents in his former home proves less compelling than either his rants about the wilfully foolish decisions that periodically betrayed the city's working-class spirit or such mischievous set-pieces as a séance ballet, a geriatric ice-hockey game, a frozen river racehorse tragedy and a fund-raising Nazi invasion stunt.

Photographer Bruce Weber ended a decade's sabbatical from cinema with Chop Suey, an unfocused, if fittingly compulsive, treatise on obsession that is reissued in selected cinemas this week. It's a dazzling scrapbook of shifting visual styles. But in allowing his fascination with dullard hunk Peter Johnson to seep into the foreground, Weber disappointingly marginalises such intriguing characters as Robert Mitchum, lesbian jazz legend Frances Faye and Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. Moreover, he's not above blowing his own artistic trumpet in commenting on the myriad mix of photographs, film clips, home movies, documents and interviews.