Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra star in this visually stunning metaphysical tale of life after death. Neurologist Chris and artist Annie had the perfect life until they lost their children in an auto accident; they're just starting to recover when Chris meets an untimely death himself. He's met by a messenger named Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and taken to his own personal afterlife--a freshly drawn world reminiscent of Annie's own artwork, still dripping and wet with paint. Meanwhile a depressed Annie takes her own life, compelling Chris to traverse heaven and hell to save Annie from an eternity of despair.

The multitextured visuals seem to have been created from a lost fairy tale. Heaven recalls the landscape paintings of Thomas Cole and Renaissance architecture complete with floating cherubs, while hell is a massive shipwreck, an upside-down cathedral overgrown with thorns and a sea of groaning faces popping out of the ground (one of those faces is German director Werner Herzog). Williams is the perfect actor to play against the imaginative computer-generated imagery--he himself is a human special effect. But the lack of chemistry between Williams and Sciorra is painfully apparent, and the flashback plot structure flattens the story's impact despite its deeply felt examinations of the heart and the spirit. Still, there's no denying Eugenio Zanetti's triumphant production design and the Oscar-winning special effects, which create a fully formed universe that is at once beautiful, eerie, and a unique example of movie magic. --Shannon Gee

The outrage surrounding the violent content in Madonna's video for What It Feels Like for a Girl is a bit of a controversy itself. Look at any episode of any cop show filmed during the last 25 years and you'll effortlessly find more car crashes and human assault containing far less artful context than director Guy Ritchie (Madonna's husband) injects here. Madonna plays something of a femme fatale Robin Hood who removes a blank-faced elderly woman from a nursing home and, with the old lady sitting shotgun, races around town in a yellow vintage Camaro wreaking havoc on unsuspecting males. She crashes into a car containing leering young men, stun-guns a fat-cat fellow at an ATM, gives his cash to a waitress at a drive-in, and steals another hotrod after she's banged up her own. While enjoying a milkshake with her octogenarian partner-in-crime, she pulls out a pistol and aims it at the heads of two stupefied-looking policemen (but she doesn't spray them with bullets--the weapon is a squirt gun). The Thelma and Louise-themed video hints that the entire scenario is imagined by the old woman, who fantasises vengeance for a lifetime of indignities suffered. Satisfying, yes. Outrageous, hardly. --Beth Massa, Amazon.com

What would Hitchcock have done if he had had modern digital effects? The answer is almost certainly: something very like What Lies Beneath, Robert Zemeckis' technically accomplished supernatural thriller that pays open homage to Suspicion, Rear Window and Psycho, to name but three. Michelle Pfeiffer delivers one of the finest, most nuanced performances of her career as a woman in an ideal relationship whose perfect life begins to unravel with terrifying consequences. Harrison Ford plays sympathetically against type as her husband who may or may not be telling her the truth. Although made in the middle of his filming Cast Away, while the director waited for Tom Hanks to shed some pounds, this is no quickie throwaway picture. Zemeckis loads this character-driven story with genuinely scary suspense, using subtle camera moves, mirrored reflections and red-herrings in a classic Hitchcockian manner--the difference here is that he has access to the most up-to-date digital effects and employs them with characteristic imagination, creating seemingly impossible camera angles that only enhance the tension. The Production Design is equally carefully considered, as even the idyllic household setting with its pristine bathroom is gradually transformed into an object of terror. Composer Alan Silvestri's score winds up the drama several notches further with an appropriate Bernard Herrmann pastiche.

On the DVD: The principal attraction of this disc is the pin-sharp anamorphic picture and 5.1 soundtrack--superb picture and sound quality contribute greatly to the enjoyment here, since Zemeckis is one of the few contemporary directors who remains acutely sensitive to the composition of each and every scene. The brief featurette is a little misleadingly titled, as it's essentially a profile of Zemeckis' career with a few comments about this film thrown in for good measure. The rather dry and uninvolving commentary is by Zemeckis with producers Steve Starkey and Jack Rapke. --Mark Walker

The wife of a professor investigates the murder of a beautiful college student who has been appearing to her

What Planet Are You From? stars Garry Shandling whose hilarious TV series The Larry Sanders Show offered him a great vehicle to show his comic performance abilities; you could scarcely tell the difference between his smile and his grimace--he always looked as if Hollywood was giving him a bad case of gas. However in this shockingly unfunny film, which Shandling co-wrote, one can only imagine that the other writers severely diluted Shandling's original intentions--the wince, his only expression, seems real. Worse, you'll share his dismay. Shandling stars as an alien from a sterile race of clones who is sent to Earth to procreate with an Earth woman--exactly why this is necessary is left fuzzy. Ostensibly, given the title, this should lead to a raucous satire of dating mores. Instead, our space invader quickly takes up with a recovering alcoholic played by Annette Bening, and we chart their stridently bumpy but predictable relationship. Greg Kinnear co-stars as a slimy co-worker; Linda Fiorentino plays Kinnear's man-eating wife; John Goodman portrays an FAA official who's onto Shandling's secret; and Ben Kingsley appears as the humourless leader of the alien planet. The single recurring joke involves the alien's genitalia and its propensity, when excited, to buzz loudly, which it does at least 10 or 15 times--afterit ceases to be remotely amusing. Shandling plays his character as so stunningly obtuse that whenever he manages a genuinely clever line it practically seems out of character; the rest of the talented cast flounders, similarly lost. Director Mike Nichols has staged painfully awkward scenes with Elan in the (distant) past--think The Graduate or Carnal Knowledge--but What Planet Are You From? simply sits there, flailing desperately, seemingly aware of its own crushing tedium. Large chunks of the film appear to have been left on the editing room floor; it's hard to imagine material even more comically futile than what appears onscreen. --David Kronke, Amazon.com