Aging King George III of England is exhibiting signs of madness, a problem little understood in 1788. As the monarch alternates between bouts of confusion and near-violent outbursts of temper, his hapless doctors attempt the ineffectual cures of the day. Meanwhile, Queen Charlotte and Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger attempt to prevent the king's political enemies, led by the Prince of Wales, from usurping the throne.
In 1930s fascist Italy, adolescent Luca just lost his mother. His father, a callous businessman, sends him to be taken care of by British expatriate Mary Wallace. Mary and her cultured friends - including artist Arabella, young widow Elsa, and archaeologist Georgie - keep a watchful eye over the boy. But the women's cultivated lives take a dramatic turn when Allied forces declare war on Mussolini.
Giff Hoyt, a cafe owner in Cabo Blanco, Peru after World War II is caught between refuge-seeking Nazis and their enemies. After the murder of a sea explorer is passed off as accidental death by the corrupt local police, Giff becomes suspicious. The police chief also intimidates a new arrival Marie, and Giff intervenes to help her. Giff suspects Beckdorff, a Nazi refugee living in the area. Beckdorff, it emerges, is seeking to uncover sunken treasure.
A mentally ill man searches New York for his missing eight year old daughter. He recreates her steps each day hoping for some clue to her disappearance, until he meets and befriends a woman with a daughter the same age. Could she help him with the missing piece of the puzzle?
Rock-and-roll singer Mary Rose Foster's romantic relationships and mental health are continuously imperilled by the demands of life on the road.
Chicken, a desperate hippie junkie living in a small Spanish village, is finding it difficult to separate fantasy and reality. This isn't helped by the villagers practising magic and child sacrifice, or his involvement with a group of boozy expatriates lost in their own dreams and regrets.
A tough, Jewish ex-con just released from prison crosses a powerful drug dealer and former prison rival in his return to a life of crime.
During the 1980s, uptight Ted Boynton is a salesman working in the Barcelona office of a Chicago-based company. He receives an unexpected visit from his cousin Fred, a naval officer who has come to Spain on a public relations mission for a U.S. fleet. Not exactly friends in the past, Ted and Fred strike up relationships with women in the Spanish city and experience conflicts -- Ted with his employer, and Fred with the Barcelona community.
An American woman is stranded in Tokyo after breaking up with her boyfriend. Searching for direction in life, she trains to be a râmen chef under a tyrannical Japanese master.
Nina is a young, carefree actress who arrives in Paris searching for her big break. There, she finds drama both on- and offstage as she becomes involved with three men: a mild-mannered real-estate agent who offers her stability, a bad-boy actor who lives dangerously on the edge, and an intense theater director who casts her in a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” As opening night approaches, the emotional extremes of Nina’s love life fuel her art.
Chris is an English teacher in South Korea who is lazy at work and lazy in life - an expat looking for a good time, trying to run away from the shame and responsibilities of his life back home.
During the 1960s, two American jazz musicians living in Paris meet and fall in love with two American tourist girls and must decide between music and love.
Chronicles three years of a middle class family seemingly caught up in their daily routines, only troubled by minor incidents. Behind their apparent calm and repetitive existence however, they are actually planning something sinister.
A group of disillusioned American expatriate writers live a dissolute, hedonistic lifestyle in 1920's France and Spain.
African student Omar would like to return home to Angola, but he is enrolled in a three-year postgraduate research fellowship at a clinic in Prague. One day while seeing off a friend at the airport, he and a girl named Mariama are brought together by chance as he offers to accompany her in an unfamiliar city toward the International Student Club, where she plays bass in a jazz orchestra.
The story of Nina, a ballerina in a New York City ballet company whose life, like all those in her profession, is completely consumed with dance. She lives with her retired ballerina mother Erica who zealously supports her daughter's professional ambition. When artistic director Thomas Leroy decides to replace prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre for the opening production of their new season, Swan Lake, Nina is his first choice.
A Martinique charter boat skipper gets mixed up with the underground French resistance operatives during WWII.
A young woman joins a theatrical troupe where she slowly believes that the director is involved with a secret group and that he is in grave danger.
Nick Hart is a struggling American artist who lives amongst the expatriate community in 1920s Paris. He spends most of his time drinking and socializing in local café's and pestering gallery owner Libby Valentin to sell his paintings. He becomes involved in a plot by wealthy art patroness Nathalie de Ville to forge three paintings. This leads to several run-ins with American rubber magnate Bertram Stone, who happens to be married to Hart's ex-wife Rachel.
The story of acerbic 1960s comic Lenny Bruce, whose groundbreaking, no-holds-barred style and social commentary was often deemed by the establishment as too obscene for the public.