A young street artist in East Los Angeles is caught between his father’s obsession with lowrider car culture, his ex-felon brother and his need for self-expression.

Two separate stories mesh – in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir.

A secret organisation offers wealthy people a second chance at life. The customer picks out someone they want to be and the organisation surgically alters the customer to look like the intended person, stages the customer’s death, gets rid of the intended person and the customer takes on a new life.

A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a rush of panic, he steals ‘The Goldfinch’, a painting that eventually draws him into a world of crime.

Bullied by classmates, a pudgy military-school student fights back by computer with the devil.

Gary Hart, former Senator of Colorado, becomes the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987. Hart’s intelligence, charisma and idealism makes him popular with young voters, leaving him with a seemingly clear path to the White House. All that comes crashing down when allegations of an extramarital affair surface in the media, forcing the candidate to address a scandal that threatens to derail his campaign and personal life.

At the beginning of a nightly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Jim seems particularly troubled. His sponsor encourages him to talk that night, the first time in seven months, so he does – and leaves the meeting right after. As Jim wanders the night, searching for some solace in his old stomping grounds, bars and parks where he bought drugs, the meeting goes on, and we hear the stories of survivors and addicts – some, like Louis, who claim to have wandered in looking for choir practice, who don’t call themselves alcoholic, and others, like Joseph, whose drinking almost caused the death of his child – as they talk about their lives at the meeting

In a traditional tribal society in the South Pacific, a young girl, Wawa, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an inter-tribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal. The young lovers run away, refusing her arranged fate. They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.

Monika, a middle-aged wealthy woman, goes through a marriage crisis with her younger husband Linas. A car accident leads Monika to meeting three young girls, Kristina, Egle and Gitana, who happen to be ex-prostitutes extradited from Germany. The lady and the girls settle down in a country mansion, to form a relationship that will change their lives forever

Pil-ju, an Alzheimer’s patient in his 80s, who lost all his family during the Japanese colonial era, and devotes his lifelong revenge before his memories disappear, and a young man in his 20s who helps him.

Three 40-something women in a small English town meet weekly for a ritual of gin, cigarettes, and sweets — and swapped stories arguing which of them has the most pathetic love life. Kate is headmistress at the local school; her best friends are the town’s police chief and a cynical, thrice-divorced doctor.

During the Civil War, at a Southern girls’ boarding school, young women take in an injured enemy soldier. As they provide refuge and tend to his wounds, the house is taken over with sexual tension and dangerous rivalries, and taboos are broken in an unexpected turn of events.