Defending Your Life

In Albert Brooks’s deftly witty vision of purgatory, the writer-director-actor reimagines the pearly gates as a cross between heaven-by-way-of-L.A. and a performance review. After advertising executive Daniel Miller (Brooks) dies in a car accident, he wakes up in Judgment City, a sun-dappled, all-you-can-eat plane of existence where he must defend his earthly behavior before a corporate tribunal to assess whether he can enter a new, bigger-brained celestial phase, or must be reincarnated on earth to try all over again. Defending Your Life is a fiercely sharp, deceptively breezy continuation of Brooks’s offbeat comic vision of modern anxieties, embellished with droll and understated observations of New Age yuppiedom, with delightfully memorable performances from Meryl Streep as Daniel’s romantic interest, Rip Torn as grinny defense attorney Bob Diamond, and Shirley MacLaine (“Oh my God”).