Although it buries the acknowledgment deep in the closing credits and has changed its name in hopes of establishing a separate identity, this is more or less a remake of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, a crest in the current wave of angelmania. A full-color remake, to be sure, and a succulently butter-basted and oven-roasted sort of color at that, save for a few nostalgic flashes of black-and-white -- an hommage to the original? -- during the angel's transformation into a sensate human being. (Brad Silberling, the director of the computer-cartoon ghost in Casper, is deemed to be the man for the job.) The woman for whom our angel is willing to give up his life everlasting has been changed from a circus aerialist to a heart surgeon -- one who cares, one who cries -- but this dose of feminism does not mean the remake has not been dumbed down. Nor does it mean that Meg Ryan, for the duration, will cut out her eyelash-batting, head-cocking, double-taking ditziness. It simply means that the focus has been shifted from lofty philosophical contemplation to soppy feminine romantic fantasizing: the fantasy, more exactly, of being loved by an "angel" instead of by the commonplace singles-bar rogue or devil; loved by someone who will renounce everything of his own in the bargain; loved by someone certifiably free of STDs, too. The sincerity of this focus can be judged at the end of the movie when one of the army of black-garbed angels asks the defector (Nicolas Cage, acting for most of the way as if he were on the UFO welcoming committee in Close Encounters) whether, knowing everything he now knows, knowing in particular that his inamorata will be taken from him after one fire-lit night, he would still opt to turn human. The total selfishness of his answer, though doubtless all too human, is seemingly without irony. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd