In present-day Texas, Maya and her on again, off again girlfriend Jules total their car after a night of backwoods raving and teen mischief. They're rescued from the wreckage by Freddy, an oil worker whose stoic facade crumbles as he comes to see himself, and his repressed desires, in Maya. As Jules recovers, Maya and Freddy develop a rapport that dulls the debilitating silence of their small-town lives. Together, they subtly encourage one another to chase after what they want the most (or at least figure out what that might be).
Pauline, a devoted and generous home help nurse, raises her two children alone, while also looking after her father, a former steelworker. Taking advantage of her popularity, the directors of an extremist political party suggest she become their candidate at the mayoral elections.
Fate has taken its toll on the aging cabaret singer Ruth and the young but terminally ill Jonas. Yet despite their great age difference and their entirely opposite experiences in life, they form an intense bond and give each other a reason and purpose to live.
A man wakes up in an alley, bleeding and with no memory of who he is. He stumbles into a coffee shop and is befriended by a charitable ex-nun who is failing in her attempts to write marketable pornography.
The beauty of the land cannot mask the brutality of a farm town. As harvest draws near, Betty confronts a terrifying new reality and will go to desperate lengths to save her family when they are threatened with being forced from their land.
A group of normal 14-year-old teenagers at a secondary school in Zürich with the normal yearnings for love and acceptance. But the power of social media, with its high-gloss selfies and perpetual pressure towards cooler and sexier, increasingly forces the kids to deny their true feelings. So a tragedy runs its course, one in which it is almost impossible to differentiate between perpetrator and victim, guilt and innocence.
It's a hot summer day in June, 1969. Marsha throws herself a birthday party and dreams of performing at a club in town, but no one shows up. Sylvia, Marsha’s best friend, distraught from an unsuccessful introduction between her lover and her family, gets so stoned she forgets about the party. Marsha, Sylvia, and friends eventually meet at the Stonewall Inn to celebrate Marsha's birth. When the police arrive to raid the bar, Marsha and Sylvia are among the first to fight back.
Paul, Joe and Louie are three young men from good families who decide to go on a bloodthirsty and pointless crime spree, much to the dismay of paul’s girlfriend (Eleonora Giorgi) and the local police commissioner (Tomas Milian). the group starts by robbing a gas station where paul guns down three innocent bystanders. When they later decide to rob a bank and a grocery store, paul ends up killing more people. It isn’t long before the entire police force is looking for the three criminals, who pick up the girl and hightail it to the Swiss border, killing everyone in their path.
Vanessa embarks on a solo trip after the death of her best friend, Jennifer. However, her self-care plans change when she finds Jennifer standing in her kitchen, claiming to be an extraterrestrial.
Two strangers – one white, one black – steal a car in western NSW and head for the coast. Jack is abrasive, cunning and disparaging about Aborigines. Gary doesn’t really care – he just wants to escape. En route, they pick up Gary’s Uncle Joe, a French hitchhiker and a young woman who’s running away. Their petty crimes escalate as they go, heading towards disaster.
Max is a 25-year-old freelance writer and aspiring novelist who seems well on his way to success in London’s cultural spheres. Yet by night, he finds a different kind of exhilaration as a sex worker with the pseudonym Sebastian, meeting men via an escorting platform. Max uses his experiences as Sebastian to fuel his stories and the worthy debut novel that he has been longing to write, finally seems within reach.
Mark Unwin is one of four employees of Krielsen International oil company captured by militant group MEND whilst they are working in Nigeria. His wife Claire flies out with Alice Onuko, Nigerian-born,British-raised P.R. for Krielsen. When the women arrive in Port Harcourt they are told a ransom has been agreed - as is the norm since MEND depends on ransoms to fund itself.
Or shoulders a lot: she's 17 or 18, a student, works evenings at a restaurant, recycles cans and bottles for cash, and tries to keep her mother Ruthie from returning to streetwalking in Tel Aviv. Ruthie calls Or "my treasure," but Ruthie is a burden. She's just out of hospital, weak, and Or has found her a job as a house cleaner. The call of the quick money on the street is tough for Ruthie to ignore. Or's emotions roil further when the mother of the youth she's in love with comes to the flat to warn her off. With love fading and Ruthie perhaps beyond help, Or's choices narrow.
Hao is part of a team of young engineers called in to investigate a series of craters that have opened up on the edge of the city. Meanwhile, a younger boy, also named Hao, spends long afternoons playing with friends and making mischief until one-by-one, his playmates start to disappear. As these parallel stories unfold, the connections between them proliferate and grow stranger.
David, a young middle-class Jewish boy, overweight, homosexual and afraid of flying, returns to Buenos Aires from Europe when his uncle dies. During his time there, David learns that his mother has decided to disconnect his father from the ventilator.
During the 1940s, a group of young men go off to war, leaving behind Ethel Ann, who is in love with one of them, Teddy. In modern-day Belfast, a man named Jimmy endeavors to return a ring found in the wreckage of a crashed plane. He travels to Michigan, where the grown Ethel Ann, who married another man after Teddy was killed in battle, now lives. Ethel Ann must decide whether to go with Jimmy to meet the soldier who last saw Teddy alive.
It’s 2006, YouTube is in its infancy, and internet porn is still behind a paywall. Taking the stage name Brent Corrigan, a fresh-faced, wannabe adult video performer is molded into a star by Stephen, a closeted gay porn mogul who runs the skin flick empire Cobra Video from his seemingly ordinary suburban home.