Albert Brooks's fourth directing job, his first in six years, with no apparent boost or wheel-greasing from his Oscar-nominated part in Broadcast News, and with no loss in modesty, either -- or integrity -- or funniness. The modest idea this time has to do with the tribunal that awaits every earthling upon his demise, to determine where he will go next: not to heaven or hell, but instead back to earth for another incarnation or else "onward" to a higher level of consciousness and intelligence. The scene in which Rip Torn, as an afterlife defense attorney, explains this set-up to Brooks provides all the evidence necessary of Brooks's high level of attainment as an actor: the infusion of his question "Is this heaven?" with a tone of "A present? For me?" and his infusion of the follow-up, lower-octave question "Is it hell?" with a tone of "Give it to me straight, Doc, I can take it"; or the mixture of protest, astoundment, and social humiliation on learning that, as an earthling, a.k.a. a "Little Brain," he has been making use of only three percent of his intellect (Torn, as a higher being, uses forty-eight). And the overall vision of the Other Side (all the deceased of the Western United States are processed in the same site, Judgment City, where the architecture has been designed to be just like "home" so as to create a smooth and "stress-free" transition) is, so to speak, ingeniously unimaginative. As is the excellent excuse for the restricted view of the resident higher beings: too advanced for us Little Brains to understand. Indeed, the onward-and-upward concept of personal evolution and the premium placed on brainpower combine to produce a kind of fantasy that might win the approval, or at least the interest, of an occultist as highbrowed as, say, Colin Wilson (though he in particular might take little interest in the funniness of it). Meryl Streep, Lee Grant. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd