A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.
Many loosely connected characters cross paths in this film, based on the stories of Raymond Carver. Waitress Doreen Piggot accidentally runs into a boy with her car. Soon after walking away, the child lapses into a coma. While at the hospital, the boy's grandfather tells his son, Howard, about his past affairs. Meanwhile, a baker starts harassing the family when they fail to pick up the boy's birthday cake.
In 1940s Los Angeles, two former boxers-turned-cops must grapple with corruption, narcissism, stag films and family madness as they pursue the killer of an aspiring young actress.
With a reputation for seducing members of the opposite sex, regardless of their marital status, a notorious womanizer discovers a beauty who seems impervious to his charms. However, as he continues to pursue the indifferent lady, he finds himself falling in love.
Igby Slocumb, a rebellious and sarcastic 17-year-old boy, is at war with the stifling world of old money privilege he was born into. With a schizophrenic father, a self-absorbed, distant mother, and a shark-like young Republican big brother, Igby figures there must be a better life out there -- and sets about finding it.
While dining out with friends, Sy suggests the difficulty of separating comedy from tragedy. To illustrate his point, he tells his guests two parallel stories about Melinda ; both versions have the same basic elements, but one take on her state of affairs leans toward levity, while the other is full of anguish. Each story involves Melinda coping with a recent divorce through substance abuse while beginning a romantic relationship with a close friend's husband.
An ambitious reporter probes the reasons behind the sudden split of a 1950s comedy team.
Camille, a young, provincial, proletarian man works for Hélène Courtray, who is still beautiful and seductive. She's a sophisticated, cultivated and well-to-do woman who has engaged him to care for her reclusive son who has spent the past few years voluntarily locked up in his room. An encounter between two persons and two worlds where the relationship of the young man to this closed, strange and unknown universe rapidly turns tragedy.
Meet a couple of hipster swingers addicted to love. He's a novelist and she's a leather fetishist who provides valuable and stimulating research for his lurid erotic adventure tales! Their open marriage allows the couple to travel a delirious, flesh-filled but barren human landscape where endless carnal thrills can take their toll on the soul!
A young designer falls under a man's erotic spell and is drawn into a world of sexual abandon from which she may never return.
What seemed like a naive adventure of love becomes a tragedy, since our protagonist Javier, being seduced by young friends of his uncle, discover a hidden plot: "The Oedipus complex". This trauma leads Javier to cause an accident in which his mother's lover dies and unfortunately herself. But the tragedy will continue.
Duke is a modern day telling of a classic western film. Dare and Roost are brothers who have been raised in a reformatory, taught to survive and conditioned to trust no one. They have moved to West Los Angeles, where Dare moonlights himself as a Detective and Roost blankets himself in old John Wayne films and reclusive habit. Cleaning the streets and ridding the neighborhoods of scum, this contemporary study finds Dare obsessed with a phantom like criminal (Winky) who seems to be terrorizing the community. Simultaneously, the same exact investigation is being led by official and likely engrossed Detective Robert Morrison. As Dare closes in on Winky and the entire department closes in on them both, these brothers must make the ultimate commitment and pay the extraordinary consequences therein.
A young man receives an emergency phone call on his cell phone from an older woman. She claims to have been kidnapped – and the kidnappers have targeted her husband and child next.
Under the leadership of their counselor, teenagers at a juvenile detention center gain self-esteem by playing football together.
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of American culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze, he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the woman's teenaged daughter.
Catherine is a woman in her late twenties who is strongly devoted to her father, Robert, a brilliant and well-known mathematician whose grip on reality is beginning to slip away. As Robert descends into madness, Catherine begins to wonder if she may have inherited her father's mental illness along with his mathematical genius.
A discount store clerk strikes up an affair with a stock boy who considers himself the incarnation of Holden Caulfield.
After nine years in psychiatric detention Theo, who has brutally assaulted and raped three women, is released. Living in a supervised community, he connects well with his social worker Sascha, finds a job at a print shop and even a girlfriend, Nettie, his principal's brittle and estranged daughter. But even though superficially everything seems to work out Theo's seething rage remains ready to erupt.
Four friends gather at a villa with the intention of eating themselves to death.
Two street basketball hustlers try to con each other, then team up for a bigger score.