Drama critic Larry McKay, his wife Kay, and their four sons move from their crowded Manhattan apartment to an old house in the country. While housewife Kay settles into suburban life, Larry continues to enjoy the theater and party scene of New York. Kay soon begins to question Larry's fidelity when he mentions a flirtatious encounter with Broadway star Deborah Vaughn.

A celebrity chef exacts revenge on a food blogger who torpedoes his career.

M.J. Clayton is a high profile Art Critic in Chicago. He is known throughout the country for his heartless and angry reviews, and is often scolded by his publisher. After a particularly mean-spirited batch of reviews, he takes a vacation to his small cottage on Mackinac Island. At a local pub, he awkwardly meets up with Frank, one of the angry artists who had been bashed by one of Clayton's recent reviews. The beers and hard liquor start to take hold, and before he knows what hit him, Clayton makes an impulsive and sloppy proclamation that any idiot can make art, and bets that he can prove it. The next morning, hung over, using supplies happily furnished by Frank, he finds himself struggling to fulfill his wager with no particular talent. Downtown is an annual art festival, and because of his notoriety and rantings at the bar, M.J. Clayton painfully finds himself featured prominently in festival literature...

Mortimer Brewster is a newspaperman and author known for his diatribes against marriage. We watch him being married at city hall in the opening scene. Now all that is required is a quick trip home to tell Mortimer's two maiden aunts. While trying to break the news, he finds out his aunts' hobby; killing lonely old men and burying them in the cellar. It gets worse.

Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) stars as an actor overlooked for a critics' acting award, despite producing a season of Shakespeare plays. After confronting the Critics' Circle, an attempted suicidal dive into the Thames results in Lionheart being rescued by your typical paraffin/meths/turps swigging tramps. Lionheart then (presumed dead) exacts his grizzly, and quite amusing revenge on the critics who denied him his finest hour.

David Kepesh is growing old. He's a professor of literature, a student of American hedonism, and an amateur musician and photographer. When he finds a student attractive, Consuela, a 24-year-old Cuban, he sets out to seduce her. Along the way, he swims in deeper feelings, maybe he's drowning. She presses him to sort out what he wants from her, and a relationship develops. They talk of traveling. He confides in his friend, George, a poet long-married, who advises David to grow up and grow old. She invites him to meet her family. His own son, from a long-ended marriage, confronts him. Is the elegy for lost relationships, lost possibilities, beauty and time passing, or failure of nerve?