In America

An Irish family enters the United States on a tourist visa and moves into a decaying building in Hell's Kitchen. Johnny looks for work, Sarah takes a job, and the daughters Christy and Ariel settle into a new school. All of them carry the same thing: the death of their small son Frankie. Christy believes her dead brother left her three wishes. Their neighbour downstairs, a sick and angry painter named Mateo, becomes the person who starts to break the family's grief open. Jim Sheridan directed and wrote it with his daughters Naomi and Kirsten Sheridan, drawing on his own family's years in New York. Samantha Morton plays Sarah, Paddy Considine plays Johnny and Djimon Hounsou plays Mateo. The daughters are played by Sarah and Emma Bolger, sisters in real life as well. It was shot in Manhattan after 11 September 2001, the first feature filmed in the city after the attacks. It received three Academy Award nominations, for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay, and won the Producers Guild's Stanley Kramer Award. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 90 percent and the worldwide gross was 25.4 million dollars. Who it is for: viewers who like family drama that does not shy away from feeling. Who it is not for: anyone who wants distance. The film addresses grief head-on and does nothing to protect you in its last half hour.