10 heavenly films about what happens after life
For some people, heaven is all harps and halos, hell all fire and brimstone. The movies, though, get a little more creative — and for all our sakes, let us hope they’re wrong.
As Hollywood again explores life after death with this week’s reboot of “Flatliners,” let’s check out 10 of our favorite cinematic depictions of the afterlife.
10. ‘All Dogs Go to Heaven’ (1989)
Yes, even lying, cheating, stealing, gambling, hard-drinking dogs voiced by Burt Reynolds go to heaven. Charlie, a rakish German shepherd, unexpectedly finds himself on the other side of the Great Divide when his partner in crime has him murdered. Ever the rake, Charlie escapes heaven to rebuild his gambling empire with the help of a kidnapped orphan girl who can speak to animals. Yes, this is a kids movie — dark, different and strange, as with the best of Don Bluth’s animated films.
9. ‘Heart and Souls’ (1993)
Bruno Ganz plays an angel — an immortal, immaterial silent observer of the human condition — who falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist. It’s haunting and suffused with longing, and there’s no better soundtrack to which to renounce your immortality for love than Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
3. ‘Beetlejuice’ (1988)
Leave it to Tim Burton to dream up an afterlife that looks less like heaven and more like the DMV (so in other words, hell). Here, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play a perfectly pleasant couple who find themselves inconveniently dead, with an obnoxious living family trying to move into the house they’re fated to haunt. Unable to scare away the family, and against advice to the contrary, the desperate newbie ghosts contract the help of miscreant spirit Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). It’s exactly as funny and exactly as insane as Winona Ryder floating in the air and lip-syncing “Jump in the Line (Shake, Señora)” with a phantom football team, and it makes being dead look fun.
2. ‘Defending Your Life’ (1991)
Albert Brooks is no stranger to neurotic indignity, but death by CD player still stings. He’s greeted by a very Brooksian afterlife in Judgment City, where white-robed souls defend the lives they’ve just lived. When he’s not sweating through his well-intentioned but anxiety-ridden life’s trial, Brooks is falling in love with Julia(Meryl Streep) who, to no one’s surprise, has life a little more figured out. The social commentary is a little dulled by the warm and fuzzies, but that’s hardly a complaint.
1. ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ (1946)
David Niven is a WWII British pilot plummeting to certain fiery death; Kim Hunter is the American radio operator who intercepts his distress call. That would be the end of most love stories, but it’s only the beginning of this Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger loveconquers-all fantasy (originally released in the States as “Stairway to Heaven”), in which the a death-cheating Niven must argue his case before a celestial court to stay on Earth with the woman he fell in love with as he fell from the sky. It’s a fanciful romance beautifully rendered by master cinematographer Jack Cardiff, whose monochromatic afterlife is trumped by the earthly delights of brilliant Technicolor.