Jim Sheridan's big-hearted American tale.

In America Directed by Jim Sheridan The young and beautiful actors of In America?Djimon Hounsou as Mateo, an African-born artist living in a New York City tenement, and Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine as Sarah and Johnny, an Irish-immigrant couple illegally setting up residence in the same slum building?make an important appeal to our modern moviegoing habits. They command the screen with an attractive, undeniable energy that emanates from the humanity and optimism of the characters they portray.

In an era that trendily celebrates facile nihilism in Memento, Mystic River and 21 Grams, this is a risky proposition. Those films were morally adrift, trafficking in the confusion, pessimism and histrionics that especially gull young viewers who mistake pessimism for glamorous profundity. In America is so divinely ebullient and philosophically assured that it could rightly be called Against Cynicism.

Irish director Jim Sheridan wrote the screenplay with his daughters Naomi and Kirsten based on their temporary experience living in the United States. Sarah and Johnny move here with their two pre-teen daughters Christy and Ariel (Sarah and Emma Bolger) who share their parents' wide-eyed enthusiasm but sustain the optimism that adults lose when challenged. That's the extraordinary part of Sheridan's proposition; he opts to tell this story of geographical and spiritual migration as a contemporary fable. When the small family drives through Times Square, dazzled by the circus of lights and overweening opulence, the car radio heralds the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?" It's among the film's many cogent pop references (including Kid Creole & the Coconuts' "Baby, I'm Real," the Eagles' "Desperado," the Byrds' "Turn!, Turn!, Turn!" as well as The Grapes of Wrath) that create a context recalling culturally shared enthusiasm and devotion. At the simplest narrative level, In America portrays the difficulty of hope?of faith between people?in the modern world. The profound part of Sheridan's proposal is stated in the Lovin' Spoonful line, "Do you believe in the magic of a young girl's soul?" which takes the movie from a sentimental premise to a bold thesis.

Children bring a disruptive, unruly reminder of life. Young Christy drives this story, praying to her dead brother Frankie but also recording the grieving family's trek on videotape. This personal form of narration uses home video (modern consciousness) to heal and connect?a humane antidote to the techno-fascism of demonlover. Sheridan similarly takes a hardnosed but blessed view of life-in-tough-times. That's also what distinguished his Ireland-set movies In the Name of the Father, My Left Foot and The Boxer. Besides having an adroit visual sense and a knack for dramatic rhythm, Sheridan is gifted with insight into how a person's behavior expresses the idealism that gives birth to political thought, social consciousness. It may be a benefit of his non-affluent background, the result of having to think about both spiritual and political necessity. In The Boxer, Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson portrayed estranged lovers whose ardent attraction went beyond the obviously physical (they were prototypes for In America's characters). And a couple of remarkable scenes here chart Johnny's relation with a neighborhood junkie; a sense of shifting fortunes always in their eyes?same as the family's interactions with Mateo, whose first identity as "the man who screams" spiritually links him to Johnny.

In America's big-L love story?interweaving the destinies of diverse gypsies?reflects upon the promise of American democracy and capitalism. This isn't "sons-of-immigrants" bullcrap like politicians and editorial writers parlay. It's America seen fresh, as a place where circumstances require moral choice. Viewers would be terribly mistaken to think Mateo's connection to Sarah and Johnny is a sappy demonstration of international brotherhood. Sheridan's black and white immigrants are drawn together accidentally (fearfully), and yet they are suspended within one another's fascination and need. Both the African artist and the questing Irish are haunted by death. Succinctly dramatizing the agony of each household (in poetic visual metaphors too lovely or sad to describe here), Sheridan allows their sojourn to be experienced as historical, humane, mythic.

Spielberg's E.T. is a touchstone for Sheridan's social fable. Mateo describes himself to little Ariel, "I'm an alien like E.T." The irony of the statement is that he isn't, really, yet he understands them, shares their feelings, and is the same as them. Djimon Hounsou also starred in Spielberg's Amistad as Cinque, the African taken in to slavery who wins his freedom in an historic Supreme Court decision. It was a performance that, if he were white, would probably be world-renown. Our children would know his name because we would make certain they understood the import of his characterization. Sheridan secures that cultural necessity. Mateo transforms Sarah and Johnny's expectations. They refer to him in Gaelic as "fear gorm," meaning blue man or devil, but Sheridan extends Hounsou's physical allure. He's In America's spiritual figure for his gentle, masculine smile; as Hounsou speaks, his eyes widen and brighten. In a witty confrontation, he tells Johnny, "I'm in love with anything that lives"?combining Mateo's gayness and humanity. His heartbeat, at one point, provides the movie's thumping soundtrack. When Ariel places her little white hand on Mateo's big black shoulder, it is a phenomenal image; the poignancy of the contrast gives dimension to the human touch.

Morton and Considine are equally tactile and vibrant. Their expressive subtlety puts the torturous emotional displays of Mystic River and 21 Grams to shame. The human scale they give Sarah and Johnny is a lesson in actors' spiritual economy?a lesson the film literalizes when Johnny's attempt to make it in New York as an actor taxes his duty as a father. Sarah upbraids him, "If you can't touch something you've created, how can you create something that touches people?" After suffering through Eastwood's and Innaritu's stylish, fake angst, it's a relief to see Sheridan measure human relations through the examples of good art?like Spielberg's, like Christy's school-pageant rendition of "Desperado" ("You better let somebody love you") and from John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath. (Sarah and Johnny watch Ma Joad on tv say, "We're the people," wanting just such simplicity and honor to grace their own lives in this impersonal city.)

For Sheridan, making art has a moral imperative. (He combines images of blood-donation with Mateo using red paint.) His sense of movies as restorative fables goes against the limited, antisocial view young audiences are trained to appreciate. Mystic River, 21 Grams and the Matrix movies are not satisfying art; they offer hollow edification. It is no coincidence that the current cynicism they represent?the disparaging of sentiment?occurs when most movies distract from our class and spiritual roots. Sheridan restores that fundamental awareness. In America reminds us where we are socially and morally?it's as if Spielberg directed one of Frank Borzage's Depression-era urban immigrant fables. There's no higher praise, but I want to specify Sheridan's distinctiveness in his unique and awed realism, as when Christy observes the adults around her who are "smiling, except for their eyes." That's deeply beautiful perception and the year's most felicitous screenwriting.

The Cat in the Hat Directed by Bo Welch Bo Welch's The Cat in the Hat updates the classic Dr. Seuss book into a family fable, but it might not be for children. This is a good thing. The properly anarchic tone emphasizes Seuss' surrealism?for adult taste. The book will always be around for nursery reading, but Welch, a former art director, has created a cinematic hallucination. What we have learned in the past decade about conspicuous consumption, post-boomer egotism and childhood autonomy (the pandering to the youth market's financial power) comes together in this treatment of a sister and brother (Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin) left home alone to indulge "pure unadulterated fun without thought...the mother of all messes."

Mike Myers plays the Cat who materializes from the sibling's unconscious?their ids run amuck. His Bert Lahr voice summons Wizard of Oz-like vaudevillian artificiality, and the result is a modern Hellzapoppin' perched on the cutting edge of video-game madness. The movie is most extraordinary when least proper (a Super Hydraulic Instantaneous Transporter referred to by its acronym; the Cat being mistaken for a pinata by a party of bat-wielding kids). By not animating Seuss (as in the famous tv Grinch special), Welch and Myers' live-action transformation affords something nearly as radical as Altman's approach to Popeye. They go beneath the bold Dr.'s surface, sending up the chaos of childhood, of smirking, winking "family" movies, promising a "circus without tortured animals and drunken clowns with hepatitis." In short, a bash.

The Cat's minions, Thing One and Thing Two, are red-suited imps with gas-blue hair and monkey faces?tantrum faces?and the purple stains they throw on Mom's furnishings make the old plastic Colorforms larger than life. Welch doesn't have the flair of Tim Burton's Beetlejuice; he imitates the Dick Tracy pastels and the op-art landscape of Barry Levinson's Toys but without ever going static. (The f/x exteriors feature blue sky and serif clouds.) It's closer to Joe Dante's Twilight Zone segment?funny, slightly scary and original. There's not enough rhyming dialogue, but the Seussified Universal, Dreamworks and Imagine logos are elation enough for logo-minded kids.