What Dreams May Come

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

So breathtaking, so beautiful, so bold in its imagination, that it's a surprise at the end to find it doesn't finally deliver.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

What Dreams May Come has the sensibilities of an art film placed into a big-budget feature with an A-list cast.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Despite its numerous missteps and miscalculations, What Dreams May Come is often a powerful, affecting piece of filmmaking.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Too bad. What dreams may come, indeed, when such enticing foreplay ends with a consummation devoutly to be missed.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

What Dreams May Come, based on a novel by Richard Matheson and directed by Vincent Ward, the New Zealand filmmaker noted for his skill at creating lavish cinematic dreamscapes, represents the uncomfortable collision of two ideas about filmmaking, one commercial, the other eccentrically, ambitiously dreamy.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A heaping serving of metaphysical gobbledygook wrapped in a physically striking package.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

There are a number of surprises in the idiosyncratic film, and one of its pleasures is the oblique and unchronological way in which Ward peels away the layers of the story, flashing backward and forward in time and jumping between Earth and the Beyond, separating his scenes with blindingly blank, white-out screens.

Empire Kim Newman

This is one of those failures that has so many near-great things that it almost gets by on guts.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

So diaphanous it practically dissolves as you watch it.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Like most dreams revisited with eyes wide open, this one's content dissolves into a transparent puddle of inchoate thoughts and predictable iconography.

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

Astonishing visualizations of the afterlife are coupled with a drawn-out allegory about communication between the living and the dead that becomes something of a trial to sit through.

Slate David Edelstein

Weds an epic, sometimes visionary, depiction of the afterlife to a script and story with fewer psychological layers than the average Hallmark card.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

An effects vehicle disguised as a metaphysical meditation (or a metaphysical meditation disguised as an effects vehicle?), this strikingly unimaginative 1998 movie contains visuals that can barely assert their niftiness amid the vacuous themes.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

This visually inventive fantasy paints the wide screen with colorful effects, but its psychological and spiritual ideas rarely rise above "new age" fuzziness.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Watching it is like being in a room with a couple locked in a torrid embrace. It might be fun for them, but what's in it for everyone else?

Film Threat Chris Gore

What's so disappointing is that the film had so much potential as a concept. The story slowly degenerates into a plodding, sappy bore.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The insidious influence of too much therapy permeates this misguided and very long picture.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

A bottomless trough of mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's most basic requirements.

Newsweek Jeff Giles

A noble but supernaturally dull movie.

The New Yorker Bruce Diones

Though director Vincent Ward used his special-effects budget well -- there are some stunning impressionistic moments -- the film is as gooey and sticky as an overcooked marshmallow.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

What a letdown that Vincent Ward, who gave us a fabulous gift with Map of the Hu-man Heart, has made this big old tub of schmaltz.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Directed by Vincent ("A Map of the Human Heart") Ward, who is either a genius or a crackpot, and derived from a long-ago novel by Richard Matheson, the film is overproduced and underpopulated, with either characters or ideas.

Salon.com Laura Miller

By the movie's numbingly predictable end, the notion of a visually unleashed cinema seems like a monstrous mistake -- we've handed over the atom bomb to the Teletubbies!

San Francisco Examiner David Armstrong

A scary example of bad movies happening to good people.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

How can a film look so radiant and be so hollow?