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 order to foil a terrorist plot, an FBI agent undergoes facial transplant surgery and assumes the identity of a criminal mastermind. The plan turns sour when the criminal wakes up prematurely and seeks revenge.
An LA detective is murdered because she has microfilm with the recipe to make cocaine cookies. Two cops partner to find and stop the fiends before they can dope the nation by distributing their wares via the 'Wilderness Girls' cookie drive.
Charlie Croker pulled off the crime of a lifetime. The one thing that he didn't plan on was being double-crossed. Along with a drop-dead gorgeous safecracker, Croker and his team take off to re-steal the loot and end up in a pulse-pounding, pedal-to-the-metal chase that careens up, down, above and below the streets of Los Angeles.
An American model is pursued by Yakuza gangsters when she writes a book about her experience modeling in Japan.
Dominic Toretto is a Los Angeles street racer suspected of masterminding a series of big-rig hijackings. When undercover cop Brian O'Conner infiltrates Toretto's iconoclastic crew, he falls for Toretto's sister and must choose a side: the gang or the LAPD.
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.
When his longtime partner on the force is killed, reckless U.S. Secret Service agent Richard Chance vows revenge, setting out to nab dangerous counterfeit artist Eric Masters.
A tough police sergeant's mother comes to visit him, and promptly starts trying to fix up his life, much to his embarrassment. For his birthday she buys him a machine gun out of the back of a van, and begins to further interfere with his job and love life, eventually helping him with a case he's on.
Beverly Hills couple Barbara and Dave Whiteman find their lives altered by the arrival of a vagrant who tries to drown himself in their swimming pool.
A werewolf loose in Los Angeles changes the lives of three young adults who, after being mauled by the beast, learn that the only way to break the curse put upon them is to kill the one who started it all.
A road trip to Los Angeles inadvertently leads a young man from Wyoming into a wild maze of psychotic hit-men, racy women, jewel thieves and a salsa band.
Into the 9.6-quaked Los Angeles of 2013 comes Snake Plissken. His job: wade through L.A.'s ruined landmarks to retrieve a doomsday device.
Two street basketball hustlers try to con each other, then team up for a bigger score.
John Matrix, the former leader of a special commando strike force that always got the toughest jobs done, is forced back into action when his young daughter is kidnapped. To find her, Matrix has to fight his way through an array of punks, killers, one of his former commandos, and a fully equipped private army. With the help of a feisty stewardess and an old friend, Matrix has only a few hours to overcome his greatest challenge: finding his daughter before she's killed.
A streetwise man flees South Central Los Angeles, heading to the suburbs and his lottery-winner uncle and cousin, to avoid a neighborhood thug with a grudge who has just escaped from prison.
A mythic motorcycle tale of father and son", this is the story of Manuel Galloway, also known as "the King of Cali", the president of a motorcycle club whose members are all African-American men, mostly white-collar workers who exchange their suits and ties at night and on weekends for leather outfits and motorcycle helmets.
A white prospective grad student's affluent family won't pay his way through law school, so he takes tanning pills to darken his skin in order to qualify for an African-American scholarship at Harvard. He soon gets more than he bargained for, as he begins to learn what life is really like for blacks in America.
Joe Pendleton is a quarterback preparing to lead his team to the superbowl when he is almost killed in an accident. An overanxious angel plucks him to heaven only to discover that he wasn't ready to die, and that his body has been cremated. A new body must be found, and that of a recently-murdered millionaire is chosen. His wife and accountant—the murderers—are confused by this development, as he buys the L.A. Rams in order to once again quarterback them into the Superbowl.
In the days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, panic grips California, where a military officer leads a mob chasing a Japanese sub.