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.
Precocious teenager Juliet moves to New Zealand with her family and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. This friendship gradually develops into an intense and obsessive bond.
A poverty-stricken woman raises her sons through many trials and tribulations. But no matter the struggles, always sticks to her own moral code.
Shaun Brumder is a local surfer kid from Orange County who dreams of going to Stanford to become a writer and to get away from his dysfunctional family household. Except Shaun runs into one complication after another, starting when his application is rejected after his dim-witted guidance counselor sends in the wrong form.
Dolores Claiborne was accused of killing her abusive husband twenty years ago, but the court's findings were inconclusive and she was allowed to walk free. Now she has been accused of killing her employer, Vera Donovan, and this time there is a witness who can place her at the scene of the crime. Things look bad for Dolores when her daughter Selena, a successful Manhattan magazine writer, returns to cover the story.
A mother tries to comfort her grieving son, but on each attempt her son’s silence becomes more and more deafening. An outing to the local aquarium places further strain on their troubled relationship - until her son finds a reason to let his mother in again.
Fifteen-year-old Mia is in a constant state of war with her family and the world around her. When she meets her party-girl mother’s charming new boyfriend Connor, she is amazed to find he returns her attention, and believes he might help her start to make sense of her life.
The lives of three disparate families are illuminated by a meteor shower on a winter night.
A dedicated wife and mother takes the blame for embezzling money that was actually stolen by her husband in order to buy medicine and a doctor's care for the couple's seriously ill infant son. Consequently, the well-meaning woman is willingly sentenced to years in prison for a crime she did not commit-all because she believes her son will fare better if the bond between father and son remains intact. Upon her release, she soon discovers that no good deed goes unpunished. Her once loving husband has remarried a woman that her son calls Mother, After just a brief glimpse of her loved ones, she simply leaves without saying a word. Many years later, she becomes a patient at her son's busy medical practice just so that she can keep an eye on his progress in secret. In a cruel twist of fate, it is only after he diagnoses her as being terminally ill does does she reveal her true identity. The poor woman subsequently learns that her former father-in-law lied about her initial release from ...
Jordon (Michael Charles Wagner) reconnects with mother Wendy (Lisa Ludwig), in the midst of a mental health crisis, over the course of an afternoon in Travis Carlson’s innovative, award-winning Western New York-lensed feature.
Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children, is a renowned linguistics professor who starts to forget words. When she receives a devastating diagnosis, Alice and her family find their bonds tested.
A self-help advocate struggles to put his dysfunctional family in its place.
The Rizzos, a family who doesn't share their habits, aspirations, and careers with one another, find their delicate web of lies disturbed by the arrival of a young ex-con brought home by Vince, the patriarch of the family, who is a corrections officer in real life, and a hopeful actor in private.
Khaila Richards, a crack-addicted single mother, accidentally leaves her baby in a dumpster while high and returns the next day in a panic to find he is missing. In reality, the baby has been adopted by a warm-hearted social worker, Margaret Lewin, and her husband, Charles. Years later, Khaila has gone through rehab and holds a steady job. After learning that her child is still alive, she challenges Margaret for the custody.
Lola, a woman consumed by loneliness after losing everyone in her life, finds solace in reliving Christmas morning every day with her mannequin son, Leo. Trapped in a cycle of nostalgia and grief, Lola clings to the illusion of a perfect family moment, even as reality slips further away.
A mother lives quietly with her son. One day, a girl is brutally killed, and the boy is charged with the murder. Now, it's his mother's mission to prove him innocent.
The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine. What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane; now Mrs. Venable wants Catherine lobotomized to cover up the truth.
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.
In 1976, a lower-middle-class teenager struggles to cope living with her neurotic family of nomads on the outskirts of Beverly Hills.
Desperate to be free from her drunken, unloving mother Diane, the beautiful, scheming young Mini seduces her stepfather Martin and soon convinces him to join her in a sadistic scheme to have Diane declared insane. But their conspiracy soon escalates to murder and when John Garson, a young detective starts investigating, Martin and Mini begin to turn on each other.