Movies

Judah Rosenthal is an ophthalmologist and a pillar of the community who has a big problem: his mistress Dolores Paley has told him that he is to leave his wife and marry her - as he had promised to do - or she will tell everyone of their affair. When he intercepts a letter Dolores has written to his wife Miriam, he is frantic. He confesses all to his shady brother Jack who assures him that he has friends who can take care of her. Meanwhile, filmmaker Cliff Stern is having his own problems. He's been working on a documentary film for some time but has yet to complete it. He and his wife Wendy have long ago stopped loving one another and are clearly on their way to divorce. He falls in love with Halley Reed who works with a producer, Lester. Cliff soon finds himself making a documentary about Lester and hates every minute of it.

Texas greenhorn Joe Buck arrives in New York City for the first time. Preening himself as a real "hustler", he finds that he is the one getting "hustled" until he teams up with down-and-out but resilient outcast Ratso Rizzo. The initial "country cousin meets city cousin" relationship deepens. In their efforts to bilk a hostile world rebuffing them at every turn, this unlikely pair progress from partners in shady business to comrades. Each has found his first real friend.

Renowned filmmaker Sandy Bates is in a professional transition, directing largely comedies early in his career now wanting to direct more serious movies so that he can explore the meaning of life, most specifically his own. Most are fighting him all along the way, including the movie going public, who continually tell him that they love his movies especially the earlier funny ones, to studio executives who are trying to insert comic elements wherever possible into his current movie in production. He reluctantly agrees to attend a weekend long film festival of his movies. Despite the throng of requests for his time, he is further able to reflect on his life as he addresses the questions at the post screening Q&A sessions. He also reflects specifically on his love life as his current girlfriend, married Isobel, shows up unexpectedly, and as he starts to fall for festival attendee Daisy - at the festival with her Columbia professor boyfriend, Jack Abel - who reminds him of Dorrie, a neurotic former girlfriend who he probably considers the one that unfortunately got away.

Early twenty-something Baltimoreans Eddie, Shrevie, Boogie, Billy, Fenwick and Modell have been friends since they were kids, and the center of their lives has been and still is the Fells Point Diner. In the last week of 1959, Baltimore Colts fanatic Eddie is scheduled to marry Elyse on New Year's Eve, but might call it off if she doesn't pass his Colts quiz on the 29th. Inexperienced Eddie turns to the only other married one of their bunch, electronics salesman and music aficionado Shrevie, for advice, but Shrevie might not be the best marriage advisor since he doesn't yet realize he probably married his wife Beth for the wrong reasons. Beth has lost her sense of identity, is unhappy in her marriage, and contemplates having an affair with someone who provides what she believes is a sympathetic shoulder. Hairdresser and law school student Boogie is the player of the bunch and has major financial problems because of his quest for the fast buck. Generally strait-laced Billy, Eddie's best man who has been away getting his MBA, has come back to Baltimore a few days early to clarify his relationship with his girlfriend Barbara. Smart-aleck Fen is a college dropout who lives off his trust fund and doesn't much like his family--just what their money can buy him. And insecure Modell is afraid to ask for anything directly. As 1960 approaches, they collectively deal with how to truly be adults.

The concurrent sexual lives of best friends Jonathan and Sandy are presented, lives that are affected by the sexual mores of the time and their own temperaments, especially in relation to the women in their lives. Their story begins in the late 1940s when they are roommates attending Amherst College together. Both virgins, they discuss the type of woman they would each like to end up with. The more-sensitive Sandy meets Susan at a mixer and believes he'll lose his virginity to her. He goes through the process methodically, considering what she wants, but there's little true passion or romance. The more sexually-aggressive Jonathan, loses his own virginity to "Myrtle," a steady but hidden girlfriend. Based on what each knows of the other's relationship, both men strive for a little more of what the other has. These relationships also set the tone for all the relationships they will have in the future. Through their lives, they always seem not totally satisfied with each relationship, still pining for what the other has. This view might change as they and their friendship hits middle age, when Sandy is with a domineering woman named Cindy, while Jonathan is with model/actress Bobbie, whose life goes spiraling downward because of her relationship to Jonathan and despite her beauty which on the surface offered so much opportunity for her. Jonathan's sexual trajectory, directed through these experiences, ends up in a manner he probably did not foresee.

While helicopters overhead spray against a Medfly infestation a group of Los Angeles lives intersect, some casually, some to more lasting effect. Whilst they go out to concerts and jazz clubs and even have their pools cleaned, they also lie, drink, and cheat. Death itself seems never to be far away, even on a fishing trip.

Simple-minded gardener Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. home of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television. After a run-in with a limousine, he ends up a guest of Eve and her husband Ben, an influential but sickly businessman. Now called Chauncey Gardner, Chance becomes friend and confidante to Ben, and an unlikely political insider.

While his latest movie

Hannah, Holly, and Lee are adult sisters from a show business family, their boozy actress mother who still believes she's an ingénue that can attract any man she wants, despite still being married to the girls' father, Evan. Hannah, on her second marriage to a man named Elliot, a financial advisor, is the success of the family, taking a break from her acting career to raise her children. Everyone turns to her for advice, while she never talks to others about what she needs or feels. Her first husband, Mickey, is a comedy show writer and hypochondriac, who is going through a crisis as he mistakenly believes he will die soon without a clear belief, as a non-practicing Jew, of what will happen to him in the afterlife. Single Holly is the insecure flaky sister, a struggling and thus continually unemployed actress, who has just started a catering business with her actress friend April, in order to do something constructive with her life. In her own security, Hannah even set up Holly and Mickey together following her own break-up with Mickey, Holly and Mickey's sole date which arguably was the worst night in both their lives. Holly turns to Hannah for everything in her life, including money, despite feeling Hannah overly judgmental about her failures. It's during a catering job that Holly and April meet David, an architect, who seems interested in both of them. Holly's insecurities may threaten her potential relationship with David and friendship with April. Lee, who collects unemployment, is metaphorically the family's piece of clay waiting for the right artist to mold her. She has long lived with artist Frederick, who has contempt for everyone except her, and as such relies on her for whatever his connection to the outside world. This already complex collective becomes even more complex when Elliot contemplates telling Lee that he has fallen in love with her. His attraction to her is as much feeling unneeded by Hannah, who he does not want to hurt regardless of what he decides to do with respect to Lee.

Alvy Singer, a forty year old twice divorced, neurotic, intellectual Jewish New York City stand-up comic, reflects on the demise of his latest relationship, to Annie Hall, an insecure, flighty, Midwestern WASP aspiring nightclub singer. Unlike his previous relationships, Alvy believed he may have worked out all the issues in his life through fifteen years of therapy to make this relationship with Annie last, among those issues being not wanting to date any woman that would want to date him, and thus subconsciously pushing those women away. Alvy not only reviews the many ups and many downs of their relationship, but also reviews the many facets of his makeup that led to him starting to date Annie. Those facets include growing up next to Coney Island in Brooklyn, being attracted to the opposite sex for as long as he can remember, and enduring years of Jewish guilt with his constantly arguing parents.

In a poor neighborhood of New York, the bitter and lonely Jewish pawnbroker Sol Nazerman is a survivor from Auschwitz that has no emotions or feelings. Sol lost his dearest family and friends in the war and his faith in God and belief in mankind. Now he only cares for money and is haunted by daydreams, actually flashbacks from the period of the concentration camp. Sol's assistant is the ambitious Latino Jesus Ortiz, who wants to learn with Sol how to run a business of his own. When Sol realizes that the obscure laundry business he has with the powerful gangster Rodriguez comes also from brothels, Sol recalls the fate of his beloved wife in the concentration camp and has a nervous breakdown. His attitude leads Jesus Ortiz to tragedy and Sol finds a way to cry.

Aurora and Emma are mother and daughter who march to different drummers. Beginning with Emma's marriage, Aurora shows how difficult and loving she can be. The movie covers several years of their lives as each finds different reasons to go on living and find joy. Aurora's interludes with Garrett Breedlove, retired astronaut and next door neighbor are quite striking. In the end, different people show their love in very different ways.

Michael Dorsey is an unemployed actor with an impossible reputation. In order to find work and fund his friend's play he dresses as a woman, Dorothy Michaels, and lands the part in a daytime drama. Dorsey loses himself in this woman role and essentially becomes Dorothy Michaels, captivating women all around the city and inspiring them to break free from the control of men and become more like Dorsey's initial identity. This newfound role, however, lands Dorsey in a hot spot between a female friend/'lover,' a female co-star he falls in love with, that co-star's father who falls in love with him, and a male co-star who yearns for his affection.

24 hours in L.A.; it's raining cats and dogs. Two parallel and intercut stories dramatize men about to die: both are estranged from a grown child, both want to make contact, and neither child wants anything to do with dad. Earl Partridge's son is a charismatic misogynist; Jimmy Gator's daughter is a cokehead and waif. A mild and caring nurse intercedes for Earl, reaching the son; a prayerful and upright beat cop meets the daughter, is attracted to her, and leads her toward a new calm. Meanwhile, guilt consumes Earl's young wife, while two whiz kids, one grown and a loser and the other young and pressured, face their situations. The weather, too, is quirky.

Benjamin Braddock returns home to California after successfully completing college. He gets a hero's welcome from his parents but Ben isn't quite sure what to do with the rest of his life. He is soon seduced by Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's partner, who methodically pursues the inexperienced young man. Soon, they are meeting regularly in hotel rooms. Warned by her to stay away from her daughter Elaine, his father goads him into taking her out on a date. He finds he quite likes Elaine but when she learns he's been having an affair with her own mother, she'll have nothing to do with him. He's smitten however and pursues her.

Frank Galvin was once a promising Boston lawyer with a bright future ahead. An incident early in his career in which he was trying to do the right thing led to him being fired from the prestigious law firm with which he was working, almost being disbarred, and his wife leaving him. Continually drowning his sorrows in booze, he is now an ambulance-chasing lawyer, preying on the weak and vulnerable, and bending the truth whenever necessary to make what few dollars he has, as he has only had a few cases in the last few years, losing the last four. His only friend in the profession is his now retired ex-partner, Mickey Morrissey, who gets Frank a case, his fee solely a percentage of what his clients are awarded. The case should net Frank tens of thousands of dollars by settling out of court, that money which would at least get him back on his feet. It is a negligence suit brought on behalf of Deborah Ann Kaye by her sister and brother-in-law, Sally and Kevin Doneghy, against St. Catherine Labouré Hospital, operated by the Archdiocese of Boston, and Drs. Towler and Marks. Kaye was admitted to the hospital for what should have been a routine delivery, but something that happened while Kaye was on the operating room table led to her brain being deprived of oxygen, resulting in permanent brain damage, and Kaye now being in a totally vegetative state requiring hospitalization for the rest of her life. Frank eventually learns that the cause seems to be that Dr. Towler, the anesthesiologist and an expert in the field, used the incorrect anesthetic for the situation. However, all but one person that was in the operating room that day has provided depositions that nothing improper occurred in the operating room. The one holdout is the operating room head nurse, Maureen Rooney, who is not talking, period, to Frank or the other side. Upon seeing the state Kaye is in, Frank unilaterally decides to do what he believes is the right thing by declining the lucrative out-of-court settlement offered by the Archdiocese and take the case to court. In doing so, he hopes the truth that the hospital and the doctors truly were negligent comes to light. Feeling that this case may be a turning point in his life, Frank has a new spring in his step, enough that he attracts the attention of Laura Fischer, the two who begin a relationship. Despite having whatever the truth is on his side, that truth which he does not know, and having an expert witness of his own, Frank has an uphill battle in that the Archdiocese has retained the services of Ed Concannon, a high-priced lawyer who has a large team of associates whose task is to help Concannon and the Archdiocese win at any cost. Concannon's task seems even easier as Judge Hoyle, the presiding judge, is already biased against Frank for taking the case to court.

A week before his friend Jack is to be married, best man Miles and the prospective groom head off to wine country for a week of fun, relaxation and - of course - wine drinking. Miles is the oenophile and does his best to teach Jack a bit about the art of appreciating great wine. All Jack cares about is drinking and carousing, something he accomplishes when he meets the attractive Stephanie at one of the vineyards. Miles is something of a sad sack, a high school English teacher who is a failed writer at heart. He has yet to get over the fact that his wife has divorced him and that she has remarried and he now faces that nerve racking wait for word from a prospective publisher. Miles has an opportunity to start anew when he meets Stephanie's friend Maya but when he let's slip that Jack is about to be married any hope of a relationship seems to be lost.

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, apparently playing themselves, share their lives over the course of an evening meal at a restaurant. Gregory, a theater director from New York, is the more talkative of the pair. He relates to Shawn his tales of dropping out, traveling around the world, and experiencing the variety of ways people live, such as a monk who could balance his entire weight on his fingertips. Shawn listens avidly, but questions the value of Gregory's seeming abandonment of the pragmatic aspects of life.