Released 1998
Stars Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra, Cuba Gooding Jr., Max von Sydow, Rosalind Chao, Jessica Brooks, Josh Paddock
Directed by Vincent Ward

Vincent Ward's "What Dreams May Come" is so breathtaking, so beautiful, so bold in its imagination, that it's a surprise at the end to find it doesn't finally deliver. It takes us to the emotional brink but it doesn't push us over. It ends on a curiously unconvincing note--a conventional resolution in a movie that for most of its length has been daring and visionary.

The facts you know from the ads and the trailers are that Chris and Annie have a Cute Meet when their boats collide on a Swiss lake. They marry. They have two children. They are happy. Then both of the children are killed in an accident. Annie has a breakdown, Chris nurses her through, art works as therapy, they are somehow patching their lives back together--and then Chris is killed.

The film follows him into the next world, and creates it with visuals that seem borrowed from his own memories and imagination. In one sequence that is among the most visually exciting I have ever seen, he occupies a landscape that is a painting, and as he plucks a flower it turns to oil paint in his hand. What happens then, what happens throughout the film, is like nothing you have seen before. Vincent Ward is a New Zealand director whose works have not always reached a large audience, but have always dared for big ideas and bold visuals to express them.

Summary by Roger Ebert