Based on short stories by Vasiliy Shukshin. About the life and people of the modern Soviet village. Old Yermolai lived all his life in one village. He has four sons, each with their own problems. The youngest foolishly ended up in jail and, three months before his release, greatly missing his family, escaped.
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.
A young man falls for a young woman on his trip home; unbeknownst to him, her family has vowed to kill every member of his family.
A disturbed, aging Southern belle moves in with her sister for solace — but being face-to-face with her brutish brother-in-law accelerates her downward spiral.
A family loaded with quirky, colorful characters piles into an old van and road trips to California for little Olive to compete in a beauty pageant.
Gina, 15, lives in a city on the edge of the forest. She admires her father, unpredictable and whimsical, able to take his children at night in the woods, even to forget them. Jimmy's more and more frequent skids end up alarming his wife Carole. Soon, the fragile family balance is broken when Jimmy is interned in a psychiatric hospital. When Gina meets Nico, a boy from her neighborhood, she awakens to love and sees a chance to escape her father.
A son returns home for his mother's funeral after she makes everyone in the family promise not to tell him about her illness.
A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey.
A car crash victim suddenly finds himself turned on by car accidents and becomes involved with an underground sub-culture of like-minded souls.
After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.
When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.
A year in the life of a turn-of-the-century middle class family, leading up to the opening of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
A retired farmer and widower in his 70s, Alvin Straight learns one day that his distant brother Lyle has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver's license. Then he hits on the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, thus beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual odyssey.
Obsessive scientist Nathan and his lover, the naturalist Lila, discover Puff: a man born and raised in the wild. As Nathan trains the wild man in the civilized ways of the world, Lila fights to preserve the man’s natural state. In the power struggle that ensues, an unusual love triangle emerges.
George, host of a television show focusing on literature, receives videos shot on the sly that feature his family, along with disturbing drawings that are difficult to interpret. He has no idea who has made and sent him the videos. Progressively, the contents of the videos become more personal, indicating that the sender has known George for a long time.
Ann, a frustrated wife, enters into counseling due to a troubled marriage. Unbeknownst to her, her husband John has begun an affair with her sister. When John’s best friend Graham arrives, his penchant for interviewing women about their sex lives forever changes John and Ann’s rocky marriage.
The story of the Buckman family and friends, attempting to bring up their children. They suffer/enjoy all the events that occur: estranged relatives, the 'black sheep' of the family, the eccentrics, the skeletons in the closet, and the rebellious teenagers.
In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.
Lincoln Hawk a hard-luck big-rig trucker takes us under the glaring Las Vegas lights for all the boisterous action of the World Armwrestling Championship. Relying on wits and willpower, Hawk tries to rebuild his life by capturing the first-place prize money, and the love of the son he abandoned years earlier into the keeping of his rich, ruthless father-in-law.
Summer 1890. In order to make some money to feed his family, Anton Chekhov, modest physician, wrote short stories for newspapers to sign Antosha Tchékhonté. Important characters, writer and editor, just make him aware of his talent. His situation is improving and Anton Chekhov gets the Pushkin prices and admiration of Tolstoy. But when one of his brothers died of tuberculosis, Anton saw it as a personal failure and wants to escape his fame and his love.