At first glance, Sheridan's latest film, In America, seems like a return to the intimacy of his earliest work as director, My Left Foot; on closer viewing it bears strongest resemblance to his first script, Into the West. It is certainly his most personal film, as well as being his most cinematic, integrating memories of the death of his younger brother, Frankie, into his own story of journeying to America with his wife and two eldest daughters, Naomi and Kirsten, who share script credit with him. It was in America that his third daughter was born and so, in the film, the young mother, Sarah Sullivan (Samantha Morton), falls pregnant with her fourth child. However, while In America invites us, through the device of interspersing footage shot by the elder daughter, Christy's (Sarah Bolger), camcorder, to view the events as a kind of home movie, it also interweaves into this a kaleidoscope of images and ideas from the history of Irish-American filmmaking.

Set in 1982, the year of the release of E.T., In America brings full circle a conceit that started with Spielberg's film. If the newly-arrived alien learns how to communicate with the wider world through a chance viewing of The Quiet Man on television, so now the Sullivan family are integrated into their new culture via the figure of e.t. After gambling the family's few financial resources on a fairground attraction, Johnny (Paddy Considine) wins an E.T. toy for his youngest daughter, Ariel (Emma Bolger). The doll stays with her throughout the film as she and her sister observe their parents try to come to terms with the death of Frankie, briefly glimpsed in scenes played back through the camcorder. Their guide through that journey is a neighbour in the Manhattan tenement they have settled in, a black artist, Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), who is dying of AIDS. Sarah is particularly receptive to Mateo's spirituality and, despite a difficult pregnancy and premature birth, has faith in his prediction that all will work out for the best. Johnny is impaired by an old-fashioned masculinity that prohibits from him from expressing his feelings. Scene follows scene rather in the manner of memories recalled, absolutely the best being the moment when the two girls find they are the only children in school to wear home-made Halloween outfits.

Sheridan himself has said that the film is about 'getting away from the death culture' that is so prevalent in Ireland and expressed so repetitively in Irish literature. Like many recent films about immigration to America (Beyond the Pale, Exiled, 2X4) Ireland is associated with a trauma in the past that is worked through by contact with the modernity of American society. However, although In America is shot, like 2X4, by the gifted Declan Quinn, the film shares none of the earlier work's sense of menace; despite living in what is known in the neighbourhood as the Junkie Building, the Sullivans seem remarkably unfazed by bringing up their children in a house peopled by the flotsam of NYC. Instead the dark interiors envelop the family and the kind of baroque atmosphere that permeates the building allows for the free circulation of the demons that suddenly materialise alongside their memories of Frankie. These can only be exorcised by the safe arrival of the new child and by letting go of the past. Ultimately, this is achieved by a double magical intervention, the passing on of Mateo's spirit to the baby and the granting of one last wish by Frankie to Christy, leaving the film end with the family leaning out of their balcony window to watch Frankie pass by the same moon that E.T. pedalled across. Thus, cinema replaces Catholicism as a validating belief system and Sheridan's writing returns to the themes of his earliest script.

The film's other reference point is Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and ultimately In America is a celebration of the Irish-American encounter, of the travails of the immigrant and the durability of the family unit, brought alive in this case by the extraordinary acting of the two Bolger sisters. Approach it with scepticism and you are left outside the charmed circle.