Final cut: Hollywood does the afterlife.

Whether heavenly or hellish, the afterlife presents moviemakers with one big headache: eternity. Drama demands that time run out--Oedipus must identify the killer of Laius before the plague wipes out Thebes; at high noon, the train arrives and Gary Cooper must face his enemies--but in eternity time never runs out. So, at the movies, eternity must be finessed.

And the simplest way to do this is to turn heaven and hell into launching pads that send the spirits of the recently deceased right back into the world. In Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and its remake, Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978), a dead athlete gets sent back from the pearly gates to fulfill his truncated career but also manages to repair injustices on earth. Just the opposite happens in An Angel on My Shoulder (1946), when dead gangster Paul Muni promises kingpin Lucifer that he'll use his second terrestrial tour to ensnare more souls for hell. In It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Clarence, the apprentice angel, gets his marching orders, while Adam Sandler as the devil's son in Little Nicky (2000) must prove himself by climbing up to earth through the New York subway system, which doesn't strike him as being much different from home. And just think of all those movies--Topper, A Guy Named Joe, Ghost, even The Sixth Sense--in which dead people, empowered by the perks of deadness (invisibility, ability to walk through walls, etc.), tease and torment us poor mortals with their cute little poltergeist hijinks. In short, heaven and hell are useful places to set up the plot, but the real action is always right here on earth.

There are also a handful of movies, however, that use the life to come not as a launching pad but as a creator of perspective. The imminence of immortality reveals the poignancy of mortality. The action is always liminal: at the threshold between two worlds, human beings and supernatural agents can interact, passports into eternity can be scrutinized, bargains struck, sins redressed, the fates of loved ones negotiated, entire human lives traced like routes on road maps.

Four films of this kind come to mind:

* From England, A Matter of Life and Death (American title: Stairway to Heaven), made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1946, is a patriotic World War II effort, but of a most peculiar sort. An RAF pilot (David Niven), caught in a burning plane without a parachute, bonds by walkietalkie with an American WAC (Kim Hunter) just before he plummets. Miraculously, he survives and the bonding develops into love. But his survival wasn't just a miracle; it was a supernal gaffe: Niven had been earmarked for death. While his body lies on an operating table, his spirit is summoned before a heavenly tribunal to defend his right to live. Oddly, part of the prosecution's case rests on the "fact" that, since Americans and Brits are essentially incompatible, the WAC-RAF romance mustn't influence the final decision. The defense remonstrates that English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic can, should, must learn to stand together to defeat Nazi evil, and therefore the romance must be allowed to flourish as a confirmation of Anglo-American solidarity. Yes, 1946 seems a late date for all this, but perhaps the moviemakers had heard grumbles of "overpaid, oversexed, and over here" from their countrymen about GIs. In any event, Tony Blair should have screened this film for his rebellious Labourites at the start of the Iraqi war.

As befits the debate that takes place there, Matter's heaven seems designed for forensics, and possesses a cold, streamlined spaciousness. (The film critic Parker Tyler saw a prophetic resemblance to the main assembly hall at the United Nations.) Only a dedicated parliamentary orator would opt for this particular Great Beyond, and it's no wonder Niven feels so anxious to get back to his sweetheart. A Matter of Life and Death is a sweetly pompous movie, a cinematic eccentricity that only the British could concoct.

* Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life (1991) is A Matter of Life and Death in reverse. Here, the hero, Daniel (an adman killed in an car accident), wants to remain in heaven, but the celestial judges may drop him back to earth if their examination of his mortal days proves that he lived without conviction or emotional commitment. He (Brooks) has fallen in love with another recently arrived soul (Meryl Streep) whose obvious qualification for higher existence will separate him from her forever if the verdict goes against him.

The first third of Defending charms because of Brooks's inventiveness in creating a heaven that is pure Southern California: the weather stations can do nothing but report that it's seventy-four degrees and clear all day, every day; the restaurants force magically nonfattening portions on the guests; and the Past Life Pavilion is hosted by Shirley MacLaine. Yet, whereas Matter continued to charm during its climactic trial scenes, Defending falters when Daniel goes before the court. Perhaps Brooks expended all his comic genius setting up the premise and had nothing left for a follow-through. Or maybe there is a dramatic flaw inherent in the premise. The joke running through Defending is that the next world isn't so different from this one (only with fewer hassles), and that since the punishment awaiting the hero is simply another mortal lifetime, it's hard to care about the court's verdict.

* In What Dreams May Come (1998), directed by Vincent Ward from a Richard Matheson novel, you're zapped up to an Elysium not to await judgment but to relive the goodness of you. Chris (Robin Williams), a wonderful doctor, perfect husband, ideal father, loses both his children in a car crash. His wife, another paragon but more fragile, attempts suicide but is restored to hope by one good heart-to-heart with her husband. Then he dies (another auto accident!) and enjoys the delights of heaven until he learns that his spouse has killed herself and is condemned to ... well, not hell, since this movie is determined with gritted teeth not to believe in hell, but to an extremely desolate place, full of smoke and mist and fire (oh, all right, already, it's hell!) where Chris, having braved armies of demons, once more redeems her with another heart-to-heart. They both end up reincarnated as children who meet cute somewhere in ... New Jersey, was it?

Robin Williams wears the same self-pitying, moist-eyed, cocker spaniel look he puts on for all his "serious" roles. Even when he is eulogizing his son at the funeral, Williams seems concerned only with how deft and poignant he himself is. And this fatuous performance is entirely representative of the entire movie, which never once stops wagging its tail while slobbering all over your sensibilities.

Dreams won praise for its visuals, even from critics who derided its script. Since the hero's wife is an artist and art restorer who shared her vocation with her husband, Chris strolls through a heaven that contains echoes of several artistic masters. But is its heavenliness supposed to be intensified by the fact that the colors in it remain, literally, paint that Chris must squish through, while a bird that poops on his shoulder poops paint? Surely a heaven for art lovers would be radiant with the beauty that art materials and techniques reach toward, but wouldn't be bogged down in the materials themselves? But what do I know? "We're seeing what we choose to see," a veteran spirit informs Chris. What Dreams May Come gives us a do-it-yourself afterlife, an Etch-a-Sketch in excelsis.

* After all the visual bombast of Dreams, what a relief to see after life (note the lower-case spelling of the title for this proudly minor movie), written and directed by the young Japanese master, Kore-Eda Hirokazu (1998). It casts its spell through close observation of manners rather than with special effects, and the sense of wonder it communicates seems grounded in some strange combination of Buddhistic tranquility and Chekhovian humanism.

In a way station somewhere between earth and eternity, five celestial caseworkers periodically interview recent arrivals in order to elicit from each the "most memorable or precious memory" of his or her life. This memory will then be recreated on film by the interviewers. The spirits watch the movies, absorb the bliss of their chosen moment, and depart into eternity endlessly reliving that single episode.

If this sounds a bit twee, I can only assure you that after life isn't. The way station isn't a cloudy paradise but a very solid, dingy stone country house much resembling the sort of place a modestly funded think tank would provide its scholars for a summer retreat. (So modestly funded that when the residents plug too many hair dryers into the wall sockets, the lights go out.) The five caseworkers are certainly kind to and patient with their charges, but also limited by their own vanities and idiosyncrasies. They are not angels but former mortals themselves who, at their deaths, could not settle on one moment to relive eternally and are therefore condemned to be only intermediaries, never dwellers within eternal bliss.

It is not the novelty of after life's premise that finally enchants the viewer but the way Hirokazu revels in the wonder of human-all-too-human personalities. He has mingled actors with nonprofessionals, and every single one of them opens up to the camera with a directness and spontaneity usually displayed only by children. As the very solid and funny spirits verbally grope through their lifetimes in search of memories, simultaneously we feel the painful evanescence of all human existence and the preciousness that even the dullest lifetime can contain if only the liver could learn how to grasp it. The question this movie finally puts to the viewer is not, What moment would you choose? but, Which moment is the essence of you? Whatever moment a spirit chooses pinpoints the center of that spirit's character. That is why the caseworker Shiori gently guides a teenaged girl away from her first choice of the "Splash Mountain" ride at Disneyland and toward a moment that expresses the girl's love for her mother.

This little masterpiece has its lunacies (why is it necessary for the memories to be restaged and turned into film clips?) and its limitations. Would evil people be allowed to take happy--happily evil?--moments into eternity? We can't know because there is no sense of evil in the movie.

However, this is the only movie I have seen that plausibly links the substance of human character to what we so glibly call "our eternal reward."

Richard Alleva writes on films, media, and culture for Commonweal.