My Life (1994)

A financial disappointment in theaters, My Life — a truthful and blunt film about death — should find new life on video. Michael Keaton plays an enormously successful, though terminally ill, public-relations executive who films a video about himself for his unborn son and, in the process, starts to question his own values. Apart from an overreliance on 12-step cliches, Bruce Joel Rubin's work as writer and director is emotionally gripping, sometimes devastating. The pity is that neither Keaton nor Nicole Kidman, as a slightly-too-saintly wife, has quite the range to match the material. This movie is worth any viewer's attention — but at an emotional peril. B+