Angels and Insects  With their beckoning tunnels of light and
stairways to heaven, soothing mantras of it's-not-so-bad and
it's-never-too-late, New Age afterlife movies are primarily
feel-good experiences, born of an understandable, even poignant
need to not just demystify but rose-tint the unknown. Still,
Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come, a bottomless trough of
mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's
most basic requirements. At once light-headed and lugubrious,
the film's vision of the afterlife makes death even more of a
frightful proposition.  What Dreams May Come opens,
nauseatingly, with Chris (Robin Williams) and Annie (Annabella
Sciorra) meeting on a lake in the Alps, and quickly flashes
forward to tragedy, killing off the couple's two young children
in a car crash. Cut to a few years hence, and Chris perishes in
similar fashion. In the first sign that the film might have been
conceived in the proximity of some king-size spliffs, Cuba
Gooding Jr. then appears to the newly deceas