Film star Elizabeth Taylor invites her ex-husband - twice over - Richard Burton to her fiftieth birthday party where, as a recovering alcoholic, he refuses to get drunk with her. He does however consider her suggestion that they star in a stage revival of the play 'Private Lives'. As they announce the project the press speculate on a romantic reconciliation. With a new girlfriend and the prospect of playing king Lear Burton is not happy with the project, especially with Taylor's pill-popping and her lack of stage experience, which causes problems at rehearsal. The play opens to a critical trashing but is popular with audiences, chiefly, again to Burton's chagrin, because they want to see Taylor and, when she is ill, numbers dwindle and the show is put on hold. After a two month run , with a projected tour, the curtain comes down and Taylor tells Burton she has always loved him and still does. A year later however his old life-style catches up with him and he is dead.

The broken farmer Dan rents his farm for the scientist John from the Bovine Genetics Technology that is researching genetic modifications of cattle to increase its fertilization. The veterinarian Orla is bitten by the calf while helping the cow to deliver, and she feels that something went wrong with the experiment. During the night, the cow has a narrow passage for the calf, and Dan asks the young couple Jamie and Mary that is parked in a trailer in front of his farm's entrance to help him in the delivery. When the offspring is born, it bites Dan; Orla arrives later and realizes that it is a genetic anomaly and she sacrifices the calf. During the autopsy of the animal, she discovers that the fetus is pregnant and she destroys the freak hybrids. However, one of them escapes and attacks a cow first and Jamie later. When John arrives in the farm, he discovers that there is the danger of infection of human beings and decides to quarantine the spot...

Old-fashioned NYPD detective Charlie Daines, a grave long cancer sufferer, feels out of his depth when as serial killer posts his gruesomely imaginative murders, mostly on top managers, on Internet, first spotted by his couch-potato son Vinnie. The brass rather confides the high-profile case to 'nerds', champion of whom is wheelchair-stuck Adam Sotrel. Charlie systematically alienates everybody, family and colleagues, but finds an angle to approach the case.

In 1660, with the return of Charles II to the English throne, theater, the visual arts, science and sexual intercourse flourish. Thirteen years later, in the middle of political and economical problems, Charles II asks the return of his friend John Wilmot, aka the second Earl of Rochester, from the exile to London. John is a morally corrupt, drunkard and sexually active cynical poet, and the King asks him to prepare a play for the French ambassador to make him pleased. John meets the aspirant actress Elizabeth Barry in the playhouse and decides to make her a great star. He falls in love for her, and she becomes his mistress; during the presentation to the Frenchman, he falls in disgrace in the court. When he was thirty-three years old, he was dying of syphilis associated to alcoholism and he converted to a religious man.

Two brothers attempt to become global rock stars but can only look on as old school friends U2 become the biggest band in the world.