Hello! Unfortunately for your good self you have stumbled into my area of real interest so I am about to nerd everywhere.

In general, how do historians today look back at the time period?

Now obviously this is a big question, full of complexities and richness of evolving historiographical methods and approaches. It is also paired down by focus of individual historians as, obviously, the conclusions an economic historian such as Stephen Constantine will differ from a social historian such as John Stevenson. Overall though we can uncomfortably divide the discourse into two 'camps'. The pessimists are broadly those who follow the conventional narrative that the years before WW2 were years of waste, decay and inertia, 'rule by pygmies', economic stagnation, international slump and the end of Britain as a great power in the shadow of ww1. The optimists are a slightly newer breed on average who question the doom and gloom of their pessimist cousins, and as you can imagine they disagree with the above list, for example championing interwar leadership, particularly of Lloyd George, Macdonald and Baldwin. The view the changes to the economy as less negative by of using on more nuanced economic measures, such as productivity, value of imports/exports and tie this to a narrative of economic change. While they cannot deny the problems with the economy these are seen as a side effect of the changes rather than an end of poor political leadership.

Overall these are very loose terms and in reality many (most) historians sit somewhere between them, often in different places depending on the time period, event or leader. However it is a useful rough guide to get started.

What are the most important events in this time?

As always this always depends on what you are looking at, I would argue Cripp's work on India was profoundly important, but only in terms of the history of the empire - it meant little beyond that narrow area. Crudely, the key parts of the story can be broken into: the rise and fall of the Lloyd George coalition and the death of liberalism, the first Labour government, the General Strike, the second Labour government and the depression, the national government and appeasement. However I am deeply uncomfortable with this list as I feel it obscures more than it helps, even of the political-economic field which these topics dominate. I would recommend reading a good narrative account and then chasing certain ideas or events down the proverbial rabbit hole.

Britain moved figuratively farther from continental Europe, were they figuratively closer to America?

To some extent this can be argued, but in reality I would say this is relatively minimal and easy to overstate looking at ww2 and postwar international relations. Britain was strategically moving towards the Americans however this was comparatively unhurried, yes they essentially forfeited alliance with Japan in part for closer relations with the US and they upset France over the US-UK running sore of naval strength with the Washington naval treaty, however in reality sucessive prime ministers spent more time in Europe dealing with European diplomacy. While friendship with America was clearly important, it's isolationism and distance made it an unconvincing ally, combine with this a sense that Europe could still manage its own affairs and that Britain was still a diplomatic power of note we see a continuing European focus. Now obviously there was difference with the Europeans and the British diplomacy may have been influenced by this sense of distinction to a slight degree, however this was the case for centuries and certainly was not a new shift. A special mention should go to Macdonald, who a a foreign policy expert, who was a whirlwind of European diplomacy in the interwar years, achieving a great degree of cooperation, in many treaties which are now forgotten due to the perceived impotence and unimportance of them considering he future outbreak of ww2.

Economically the picture is a little more rosy, with increasing integration of import/exports with America and modest rise of consumer goods crossing the Atlantic towards the end of the period. However in many cases the US was an economic competitor, protectionism and economic efficiency wreaked havoc on the realtive balance between the two and gave Britain the short end of the deal. Additionally America was beginning to replace Britain as finance and 'invisible economy' leader of the world, undercutting a critical buffer of British balance of payments which were otherwise perpetually in the red. So while we see more integration, we also see stiffer competition.

How was Britain's interwar period different from America's?

I can't answer this in a lot of depth as my knowledge of America in this period is weaker, however crudely: Britain was poorer, politically more fractured/inert and relatively declining as a world power in comparison with American ascendancy. Britain's economy grew less than the US, hell it grew less than France, and saw considerably less capitalisation and modernisation which only compounded this. Politically we have a 20s of instability, though there was a conservative ascendancy two adds the end of the decade, followed by coalitions, splitting parties at the start of the 1930s. Internationally Britain's prestige sagged under its obvious weakness and diplomatic vacillating.