In the Talking Heads classic “Heaven,” David Byrne asserts, in the declarative tense of someone who’s been there, that “Heaven is a place / a place where nothing / nothing ever happens.” Depending on the receiver, this information is either a relief or a comedown — a paradise of blessed stillness or an eternity of boredom.
In Byrne’s metaphor, heaven is a bar whose live band plays his favorite song on an infinite loop. Such an appraisal would have fit nicely into the compendium of American opinions that constitutes most of Heaven (Kino Lorber, Blu-ray, $17.47), Diane Keaton’s odd, questing 1987 documentary. That the great actor’s only nonfiction film comprised a survey of beliefs on the afterlife from various and sundry characters across secular and theological spectrums is a testament to her deep curiosity about the great beyond — a curiosity that is, following her 2025 death, presumably sated.
To some of the people who sit before Keaton’s camera, heaven is a gilded paradise of precious gems, puffy clouds and endless marshmallows. To others, it’s a metropolis similar, in the speaker’s conception, to “New York, Miami or L.A.” A preacher who has worked out the mathematics of heaven is confident to report that it’s “5,000 times bigger than New York City.”
A gaggle of kids, channeling the ad lingo of the consumerist 1980s, hope heaven is a place where they can have “more stuff for less.” Others — always women — describe heaven as a paradise where they can eat what they want and never gain weight. One woman is confident that in the heaven where she’s headed, everyone’s skin is white regardless of their race in Earth. (So heaven is basically Maine, then?)
Discussions spin off from heaven more broadly into concepts of God, creation, hell and mortality, with interviewees ranging from atheists to manic street preachers, their beliefs occasionally clashing in funny, disputatious, maddeningly circular debates.
Keaton, working with cinematographers Frederick Elmes and Joe Kelly, favors an eccentric framing of her subjects that often feels like an affectation. One man is shown in a wide angle, sitting at a table with a six-pack in front of him. For others, the camera is so obtrusively close that the sitters’ dental work is evident. From the copious headroom to the distracting lighting effects, each setup seems intended to reflect the quirks of the speakers’ personalities, but I’m not sure a one-size-fits-all, Errol Morris-style approach wouldn’t have better served the material.
Amid the interviews, Keaton weaves in footage from a motley assortment of vintage Hollywood movies, from chaotic death scenes to placid visions of the afterlife. The editing of these clips is fast, and the effects of their collisions is bewildering. In one example, the camera hurtles toward the moon, intercut with close-ups of the title character in The Passion of Joan of Arc trembling before a clock. Occasional audio snippets, like a repeated and chopped-up report of Mama Cass fatally choking on a sandwich, further juxtapose or corroborate the ever-shifting images.
In creating new conversations between bits of recycled material, Keaton effectively looks back toward the origins of avant-garde cinema while anticipating the low-attention-span mashups of today’s TikTok era. As a result, Heaven can be a bit much; its 80-minute running time is plenty long to bask in its barreling narrative style. But in conjuring both the pioneering work of silent Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov and the contemporary audiovisual collages of artists such as Vic Berger, Heaven feels like a missing link of experimental cinema — a stubborn tower of Babel whose most daring and overindulgent qualities are inseparably entwined.
Faith, as both a constricting vise and a possible salve, is also a subject of Little Trouble Girls (Kino Lorber, $14.99 Blu-ray, $19.99 DVD), the remarkable first feature from Slovenian director Urška Djukić, released last year as its country’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards. The trouble of the title arises at a convent, where an all-girls choir has alighted for a three-day intensive with their fussy and short-tempered conductor (Saša Tabaković).
We follow Lucija (Jara Sofija Ostan) — 16, sheltered, and still awaiting menstruation — as her budding sexual urges and her fundamentalist upbringing clash in the house of the Lord. As Lucija grows closer to her more experienced and hedonistic choir-mate, Ana-Marija (Mina Švajger), she also wrestles with the unorthodox feelings that surface around an older, and very male, immigrant worker hired to restore parts of the convent.
In presenting one’s teenage years as a minefield of potential embarrassments, Little Trouble Girls would make a discomfiting double feature with Charlie Polinger’s The Plague, another 2025 film in which a character comes of age in a gender-segregated sleep-away situation. But Djukić brings a thoroughly distinctive feminist voice to her filmmaking, which revels in the female gaze to create sustained erotic tension in various configurations. She favors long single takes, often fixing the camera in unusual positions — such as Lucija’s neck during her first experiment with self-pleasure — but employs quick-cutting associative montages just as confidently. In one emblematic plunge into Lucija’s headspace, the camera zooms slowly into Ana-Marija’s navel before cutting to a bee pollinating a flower.
Alongside this hothouse atmosphere, the film offers one of the most eloquent descriptions of the appeal of the celibate life that I’ve heard voiced in any language. Lucija suffers her share of indignities in Little Trouble Girls, both personally and professionally, but Djukić is kind enough to offer her multiple off-ramps — and wise enough to leave her character’s future unwritten.