T.S. Spivet lives on a ranch in Montana with his mother who is obsessed with the morphology of beetles, his father (a cowboy born a hundred years too late) and his 14 year-old sister who dreams of becoming Miss America. T.S. is a 10 year-old prodigy with a passion for cartography and scientific inventions. One day, he receives an unexpected call from the Smithsonian museum telling him that he is the winner of the very prestigious Baird prize for his discovery of the perpetual motion machine and that he is invited to a reception in his honor where he is expected to give a speech. Without telling anyone, he sets out on a freight train across the U.S.A. to reach Washington DC. There is also Layton, twin brother of T.S., who died in an accident involving a firearm in the family's barn, which no one ever speaks of. T.S. was with him, measuring the scale of the gunshots for an experiment, and he doesn't understand what happened.

The world watches in awe as the Roebling Clipper is launched into space. Using state-of-the-art scalar engines to fly around the Moon and back in just hours, the maiden voyage of the first-ever trans-lunar passenger ship is about to make history. Among those on board: First Lady Simone Mathany, space-exploration entrepreneur Steve Roebling, Dr. Denise Balaban, pilot Fiona Henslaw, and a very lucky lottery winner. But while en route, a massive solar flare sparks a cosmic-ray burst that accelerates Aurora's engine and blows the ship away from Earth's orbit. Now out of control, it's hurtling straight for the sun. At Mission Control, along with the desperate President Thomas Mathany, an increasingly anxious team of experts puts a plan into motion - an interception by a shuttle attached to the International Space Station. When that ends in disaster, the Aurora only picks up speed. Now being pulled toward the sun at three percent of the speed of light, it's only a matter of hours before it ...

The widows of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and how they carry on as single mothers after the assassination of their husbands.

Famed mystery writer, Mort Rainey (Depp) is confronted by a mysterious stranger outside his house. This stranger calls himself John Shooter (Turturro) and claims that Mort has stolen an idea for a story from him. Mort says he can prove he wrote his first, but whilst Mort waits for the evidence to appear, Shooter starts to become more and more violent.

District attorney Ford Cole is running for mayor, promising to capture the city's elusive crime boss, Danny Ludin. On the night of a gas link in the inner city, his interview with a national reporter is interrupted by word that his best prosecutor, Nora Timmer, who's also his lover, has killed a man she claims was assaulting her. A few minutes later, a man shows up at Cole's office claiming it was murder, implicating Nora in complicated schemes and crimes. Cole wants a few hours to get to the bottom of a mess that quickly includes land deals, shell corporations, and political corruption. Who's setting up whom?