based on 1982 summer friends

Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer -- arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. Some time ago, she divorced the husband she no longer loved. Until recently, she has been in a fairly satisfactory S and M relationship with Marlene (her secretary, maid, and co-designer). She mistreats her. Enter Karin, a 23-year-old beauty who wants to be a model. She falls in love with Karin and invites her to move in. The rest of the film deals with the emotions of this affair and its aftermath. Fassbinder tells his story in a series of 5 or 6 long scenes with extended uses of a single camera shot and deep focus.

As a young girl in Japan, Nagiko's father paints characters on her face, and her aunt reads to her from "The Pillow Book", the diary of a 10th-century lady-in-waiting. Nagiko grows up, obsessed with books, papers, and writing on bodies, and her sexual odyssey (and the creation of her own Pillow Book) is a "parfait mélange" of classical Japanese, modern Chinese, and Western film images.

Thirteen years after World War II, concentration camp survivor Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) and her tormentor Max (Sir Dirk Bogarde), currently the night porter at a Vienna hotel, meet again and fall back into their sado-masochistic relationship.

Cathy is the perfect 50s housewife, living the perfect 50s life: healthy kids, successful husband, social prominence. Then one night she stumbles in on her husband Frank, kissing another man, and her tidy world starts spinning out of control. In her confusion and grief, she finds consolation in the friendship of their African-American gardener, Raymond - a socially taboo relationship that leads to the further disintegration of life as she knew it. Despite Cathy and Frank's struggle to keep their marriage afloat, the reality of his homosexuality and her feelings for Raymond open a painful, if more honest, chapter in their lives.

Four erotic tales from in various historical eras. The first, 'The Tide', is set in the present day, and concerns a student and his young female cousin stranded on the beach by the tide, secluded from prying eyes. 'Therese Philosophe' is set in the nineteenth century, and concerns a girl being locked in her bedroom, where she contemplates the erotic potential of the objects contained within it. 'Erzsebet Bathory' is a portrait of the sixteenth-century countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins, while 'Lucrezia Borgia' concerns an incestuous fifteenth-century orgy involving Lucrezia, her brother, and her father the Pope.

Servais Mont, a photographer, meets Nadine Chevalier who earns her money starring in cheap soft-core movies. Trying to help her, he borrows the money from the loan sharks to finance the theatrical production of 'Richard III' and gives Nadine a part. Nadine is torn apart between Servais, for whom she is falling in love, and her husband Jacques, to whom she has moral obligations.

Taken from Hubert Selby, Jr.'s controversial novel set in early 1950s Brooklyn. During a bitter strike by workers against a local factory, a gallery of struggling characters are crushed by their squalid surroundings and selves: an unhappily married union strike leader discovers he is gay; a jaded prostitute falls in love with one of her clients, a naive young sailor; a union negotiator attempts to peacefully resolve the strike while desperately hiding the fact that he's a communist; the family of a striking factory worker cannot cope with the fact that their teenage daughter is illegitimately pregnant.

A young woman gets killed in an accident trying to meet her favorite actress Myrtle Gordon after a play. Then Myrtle Gordon felt responsible for the killing leading her down to an emotional crisis that interferes with her professional work as an actress.

A story of amour fou. Walt is madly in love/lust with a young illegal Mexican immigrant. However, the object of his unrequited affection doesn't even speak any English and finds Walt really strange and undesirable.

Zorg is a handyman working at the seaside in France, maintaining and looking after the wooden bungalows. He lives a quiet and peaceful life, working diligently and writing in his spare time. He is in love with Betty, a young woman who is as beautiful as she is wild and unpredictable. After a dispute with Zorg's boss, they leave and Betty finds a place to stay at her girlfriend's house. The girlfriend's lover owns an Italian restaurant and there they find a job. She is obsessed to try to get one of Zorg's books published, but it is rejected, which makes Betty fly into a rage. Suddenly, Betty's wild manners start to get out of control. Zorg sees the woman he loves slowly going insane. Is his love for Betty strong enough, if even if it comes to the worst?

This psychological thriller is true to its subjects as well as being complex, dynamic, and overly dramatic. How something so long ago, seemingly trivial, years later with more significant trauma, turns repressed emotions into a dysfunctional life and distorted thinking. This is all merged into a psychological menagerie that unfolds piece by piece to perfection.

Paris, spring 1968. While most students take the lead in the May 'revolution', a French poet's twin son Theo and daughter Isabelle enjoy the good life in his grand Paris home. As film buffs they meet and 'adopt' modest, conservatively educated Californian student Matthew. With their parents away for a month, they drag him into an orgy of indulgence of all senses, losing all of his and the last of their innocence. A sexual threesome shakes their rapport, yet only the outside reality will break it up.

"Safe" has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband, a beautiful house, servants, beauty, and a lot of friends. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn't turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grandmal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she's become sensitive to the common toxins in today's world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an allergic reaction to milk but explains that there is no treatment for that sort of allergy. She sees a psychiatrist who does nothing but make her nervous. In the hospital, Carol sees an infomercial for Wrenwood, a new-age retreat for those who are "environmentally ill," and leaves her husband and stepson to try and find salvation at this retreat: headed by a phony, grandstanding, "sensitive" individual named Peter Dunning.

Since a road accident left him with serious facial and bodily scarring, a former TV scientist has become obsessed by the marriage of motor-car technology with what he sees as the raw sexuality of car-crash victims. The scientist, along with a crash victim he has recently befriended, sets about performing a series of sexual acts in a variety of motor vehicles, either with other crash victims or with prostitutes whom they contort into the shape of trapped corpses. Ultimately, the scientist craves a suicidal union of blood, semen, and engine coolant, a union with which he becomes dangerously obsessed.

For more than a month, eating only powered sugar, a woman tries to deal with a breakup: she paints her room twice, removes the furniture, writes and rewrites a letter to her lover, clarifying all she had said. She spreads the pages on the floor. She lies down and waits. Finally, her sugar eaten, she is hungry and leaves. She flags down a truck; she and the trucker drive through the dark, stopping at a diner and bars. He asks for a hand job, she complies. He talks about his wife, children, and sex life. She arrives at the flat of her lover, a woman, who tells her she cannot stay. She says she is hungry, so her lover feeds her then allows her to stay the night. They make love.

While looking for an apartment, Jeanne, a beautiful young Parisienne, encounters Paul, a mysterious American expatriate mourning his wife's recent suicide. Instantly drawn to each other, they have a stormy, passionate affair, in which they do not reveal their names to each other. Their relationship deeply affects their lives, as Paul struggles with his wife's death and Jeanne prepares to marry her fiance, Tom, a film director making a cinema-verite documentary about her.

Mike Waters lives on the street and befriends the somewhat older and streetwise Scott Favor who shows him what is necessary to survive. Waters suffers from narcolepsy and can fall asleep at any moment and in almost any circumstance. Favor comes from a rich family and is rebelling against his own background. They travel together extensively - Waters is driven by the need to find his biological mother - and spend time in Italy. Later in life however, Favor has joined mainstream society and has little time for his old friend.

A photographer and his wife take photographs of Armenian churches for use in a calendar. Their driver, a local resident, expounds on the history of the churches while the wife translates. The photographer becomes jealous of his wife's bonding with the driver. In a series of flash-forwards, the photographer stages identical dinners with several women, who pretend to talk on the phone while he writes. His wife, now estranged from him, leaves repeated messages on his answering machine, asking why he never contacts her. Yet another thought-provoking look into strange, intertwined relationships from the always enigmatic Egoyan.