Prologue

The life of a married Munich technical draftsman with a son.

After the death of her abusive father, lonely librarian Martha is caught in a strange, sadomasochistic relationship with a monstrous husband whom she begins to suspect may be trying to murder her.

In 1920s China, a nineteen year old Songlian is forced to marry the much older lord of a powerful family. With three wives already, each living in a separate chamber in the mansion, they constantly play mind games for his attention. Songlian joins the fierce competition, slowly uncovering the dark truths that lie within their gilded cage.

The Gamblers

The life of celebrated but reclusive author J.D. Salinger, who gained worldwide fame with the publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye.

Ted Kramer is a career man for whom his work comes before his family. His wife Joanna cannot take this anymore, so she decides to leave him. Ted is now faced with the tasks of housekeeping and taking care of himself and their young son Billy.

The last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. Frederic leads a bourgeois life; he is a partner in a small Paris office and is happily married to Helene, a teacher expecting her second child. In the afternoons, Frederic daydreams about other women, but has no intention of taking any action. One day, Chloe, who had been a mistress of an old friend, begins dropping by his office. They meet as friends, irregularly in the afternoons, till eventually Chloe decides to seduce Frederic, causing him a moral dilemma.

A sprawling drama centered on five key days in a family's life.

George and Katherine plan to marry but war breaks out. When he returns on two weeks leave, but has his marriage proposal put down by Katherine, George enters a relationship with another woman.

For revenge, wealthy Osbert Gault marries Virginia Mynors, the daughter of a woman who had jilted him years earlier. Unaware of Gault's motives, Virginia consents to the marriage for the sake of her impoverished family.

Zu Zweit

A desperate, childless couple kidnap a pregnant woman and lead her husband to believe that she is dead.

Due to her parents' divorce, a young lady named Judy begins to doubt herself and love in general as her wedding day approaches.

An ensemble of interconnected twentysomethings struggle with the complications of life, work, and love as they cross paths in the city throughout one day.

The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.

Tita is passionately in love with Pedro, but her controlling mother forbids her from marrying him. When Pedro marries her sister, Tita throws herself into her cooking and discovers she can transfer her emotions through the food she prepares, infecting all who eat it with her intense heartbreak.

Not long after they cross paths at an art gallery, architect Ray Reardon and hypnotically sensual Lena are married with children. But as strange incidents occur, Ray begins to realize he may not really know the woman he married.

A sophisticated hotel somewhere on the French coast. Silvia and Gustav meet here, they have recently split up after 19 years of marriage. But they know each other well, and a fight begins in which Silvia always seems one step ahead. So she quickly realizes that Gustav's new, younger girlfriend is already expecting a child from him. The secret meeting between Silvia and Gustav takes a new turn when Gustav suddenly finds out that the conference center in Toulouse, where he is allegedly staying, was blown up in a terrorist attack.

In 1968 the lives of a retired doorman, hotel manager, lounge singer, busboy, beautician and others intersect in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

When affluent executive Wayne Hayes is kidnapped by a disgruntled employee and held for ransom in a forest, Wayne’s wife is forced to reckon with the FBI agents as they negotiate with the kidnapper.