Four tales, each centered on a woman, journey inward to explore the enigmatic reality of their lives, connecting through a single narrative thread.
Two women confront their boyfriend, a two-timing actor who professed eternal love to each.
The story of two men on different sides of a prison riot -- the inmate leading the rebellion and the young guard trapped in the revolt, who poses as a prisoner in a desperate attempt to survive the ordeal.
Patricia Highsmith’s late life solitude in the Swiss Alps is interrupted by Edward, a young literary agent sent by the writer’s relentless publishing company to convince her to pen one last novel in her wildly popular Ripley series. Highsmith uses her famously macabre imagination to scare Edward away, but before they know it, a collaboration ensues, leaving the world they’ve constructed indistinguishable from their own.
During a visit to childhood friend Edith, retired housewife Hetty Wainthropp discovers that Edith's husband, Frank, has a son by a previous marriage. Hetty decides to turn amateur detective to trace him. When this gives her a taste for detection, Hetty decides to set up a private detective agency.
Marvin, a young aspiring writer from New York, moves to California to write a novel. He ends up rooming with a chaotic, bohemian musician named Jay. Marvin finds himself inexorably drawn into the vibrant youth culture of San Francisco's Mission District as both Jay and himself watch their worlds disintegrate. They discover that each has a lot to learn from the other. Mission is a coming-of-age story casting a spotlight on a place and time, moments before artistic aspiring types yielded the Mission to the dotcom entrepreneurs.
Deliveryman Jong-su is out on a job when he runs into Hae-mi, a girl who once lived in his neighborhood. She asks if he'd mind looking after her cat while she's away on a trip to Africa. On her return, she introduces to Jong-su an enigmatic young man named Ben, who she met during her trip. One day Ben tells Jong-su about his most unusual hobby.
Kishanlal marries the beautiful Lachchi, but the day after the wedding, he leaves on business for five years. When Kishanlal reappears only a few days later, Lachchi is delighted, but this new Kishanlal is in fact a spirit who has taken the form of Lachchi's husband, after having seen her by chance and fallen in love with her. Four years later, the real Kishanlal returns and the townsfolk must determine who is who.
Ruby and her husband Claude are a working-class couple who live in suburban Arkansas. As crazy as they are for each other, their relationship is far from harmonious. (The lack of money doesn't help matters, either.) In fact, their whole family is fraught with unresolved conflicts. Then Claude's uncle is arrested on a felony charge, and everyone rallies round. Ruby's mother Jewel and flirtatious sister Rose (Claude's ex-girlfriend) even fly in from Tennessee; but, far from being a source of support, Jewel seems only to want to break up Ruby and Claude.
A magazine writer poses as a Jew to expose anti-Semitism.
Guests at a posh Berlin hotel struggle through worry, scandal, and heartache.
An airline pilot pursues a live-in babysitter at his hotel and gradually realizes she is not as stable as perhaps she should be.
Dorothy Parker remembers the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of friends whose barbed wit, like hers, was fueled by alcohol and flirted with despair.
One night, in a Los Angeles hospital, Dr. Flax attends to a seriously injured man who, apparently crazed, whispers mysterious and disconcerting words in French into her ear.
While celebrating their reconciliation and six years of marriage, American actress Sally Nash and British novelist Joe Therrian receive their close friends, some colleagues and their next door neighbors in a party. Under the effect of Ecstasy, revelations are disclosed and relationships deteriorate among the group.
When retired racket boss John Sarto tries to reclaim his place and former friends try to kill him, he finds solace in a monastery and reinvents himself as a pious monk.
In an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.
A concentration camp survivor discovers her former torturer and lover working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna. When the couple attempt to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them.
The misadventures of four groups of guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Enforcing the law within the notoriously rough Brownsville section of the city and especially within the Van Dyke housing projects is the NYPD's sixty-fifth precinct. Three police officers struggle with the sometimes fine line between right and wrong.