A troubled loner, Bob Maconel, imagines blowing up the tower in Los Angeles where he works. He takes a revolver to his office intent on killing colleagues, and then himself. At home, he holds conversations with his fish, who encourage him to do it. His supervisor picks on him. As he’s screwing his courage to the sticking place, he drops a bullet; while on the floor looking for it, another colleague does exactly what Bob has been planning. Bob emerges a hero and the one colleague he likes, a woman with a bright smile, is severely wounded. Can Bob help her through despair and find himself and joy in life? Or, as everyone says, is this impossible for a man like him?

Sally Bowles, an American singer in 1930s Berlin, fall in love with bi-sexual Brian. They are both then seduced by Max, a rich playboy. Sally becomes pregnant, and Brian offers to marry her… All the characters are linked by the Kit-Kat club, a nightspot where Sally sings.

Code 46 is a love story set in a Brave New World-type near-future where cities are heavily controlled and only accessible through checkpoints. People cannot travel unless they have “papelles,” a special travel permit issued by the totalitarianistic government, the “Sphinx”. Outside these cities, the desert has taken over and shanty towns are jammed with non-citizens - people without papelles forced to live primitive lives. William is a family man who works as a government investigator. When he is sent to Shanghai to solve a case of fake papelles, he meets a woman named Maria. Although he realizes she is behind the forgeries, he cannot help but fall completely in love with her. He hides her crime and they have a wild, passionate affair that can only last as long as his papelles: 24 hours. Back home, William is obessed with the memory of Maria. When the original investigation is inevitably re-opened a week later and William is sent back to finish the work he started, he tracks her down, only to discover she has been accused of a Code 46 violation and any further relationship is impossible.

Wealthy, brilliant, and meticulous Ted Crawford, a structural engineer in Los Angeles, shoots his wife and entraps her lover. He signs a confession; at the arraignment, he asserts his rights to represent himself and asks the court to move immediately to trial. The prosecutor is Willy Beachum, a hotshot who’s soon to join a fancy civil-law firm, told by everyone it’s an open and shut case. Crawford sees Beachum’s weakness, the hairline fracture of his character: Willy’s a winner. The engineer sets in motion a clockwork crime with all the objects moving in predictable ways.

While in the burial of Countess Torlato-Favrini, her friend Harry Dawes and her acquaintance Oscar Muldoon recalls parts of her past. When the wealthy Kirk Edwards hires director and screenplay writer Harry Dawes, they travel to Spain with the public relations Oscar Muldoon to see the dancer of a nightclub Maria Vargas and invite her for an audition, since they need a new face for their next movie. Maria, a naive woman with simple origins, is convinced by Harry to go to Hollywood and becomes a famous star and a close friend of Harry and his girlfriend Jerry. Along her successful career, Maria lives personal dramas including lack of adaptation for her new lifestyle, is unable to love and is disputed by the powerful millionaires Kirk Edwards and Alberto Bravano. When she meets the noble and handsome Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini in the French Riviera, she believes that she found her prince charming and her life becomes a fairy tale. But after the wedding, she sees that her Cinderella’s castle of dreams has become a pumpkin.

Six New Yorkers have an interrelated series of relationships. TV producer Tommy, who’s just broken up with his girlfriend, has a short relationship with commitment-phobe Maria, who he meets in a video store, and also hooks up with married real-estate agent Annie, who he meets while apartment hunting. Annie is open to a relationship because her husband, Griffin, is cheating on her, which she slowly comes to realize through talking to her friend/co-worker who’s gone through the same thing. Griffin, a 39-year-old dentist, is cheating with 19-year-old waitress Ashley, who he picked up in a park; she realizes she can do better when Ben, a hotel doorman and aspiring musician, tries to pick her up, in a belated attempt to recover from his divorce a year ago from schoolteacher Maria (the same Maria from the video store). Most of these relationships seem driven more by a desperate need to be in a relationship than actual love.

Sarah Huttington, recently engaged, goes home to Pasadena with fiancé Jeff for a family wedding. She hears a rumor that “The Graduate” (book and movie) are based on her family. Did her grandmother and her mom have flings with the same man just before her parents married? Is she a strange man’s child; does this explain why she doesn’t fit in? Was her mother happy? Is she too facing a loveless marriage? Where can she seek answers: her mother’s dead, her father’s a pleasant naïf. Ask her salty grandma? Better to ask the man in the triangle, the real Benjamin Braddock. With Jeff’s blessing, Sarah heads for San Francisco, looking for the key to her past and to her future.

Kate (Meg Ryan) and Charlie (Timothy Hutton) have a perfect life planned out before them: buying a house, marriage, kids, the whole works. Kate’s fear of flying keeps her in Canada while Charlie goes to Paris for a medical convention. While there Charlie is smitten by the lovely Juliette (Susan Anbeh). He calls off the wedding with Kate and she nervously boards a plane to get him back. She ends up sitting next to the petty French thief Luc Teyssier (Kevin Kline). He hides a stolen necklace and smuggled grape vine in her bag to get it through customs. Her bag is stolen, the necklace apparently lost, and Kate and Luc head to Cannes — Luc to find the necklace and Kate get Charlie back. Along the way, Kate and Luc begin having feelings for each other — which change the course of their lives.

1950’s Los Angeles is the seedy backdrop for this intricate noir-ish tale of police corruption and Hollywood sleaze. Three very different cops are all after the truth, each in their own style: Ed Exley, the golden boy of the police force, willing to do almost anything to get ahead, except sell out; Bud White, ready to break the rules to seek justice, but barely able to keep his raging violence under control; and Jack Vincennes, always looking for celebrity and a quick buck until his conscience drives him to join Exley and White down the one-way path to find the truth behind the dark world of L.A. crime.

Three fraternal bank robbers languishing in jail, discover a profitable (if not dodgy) way to spend their time. Crime can most certainly pay, if you “know wot I mean?” However when sex and greed rear-up between the good crims and the bad cops, the consequences are both bizarre and fatal.