Louie is a New York slum landlord who is given 120 days to repair one of his apartment blocks. The problem for Louie is that he must live in the rundown block until the repairs are complete. Louie's father is the real boss, and he has no intention of paying for the repairs. This leaves Louie to live in the squalor his tenants endure all year round.

Ex-detective Dave Robicheaux has made a new life for himself and his wife Annie running a bait shop in the outskirts of New Orleans. When they save a little girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash, their lives become forever changed. They take the orphan child into their home and prepare to raise her. However, a visit from DEA agent Dautrieve brings out the detective instincts in Robicheaux and he begins to ask about the rest of the passengers. This brings trouble to Robicheaux and he turns to...

Bob Rafelson has stated that this is the final part of an informal trilogy he started with "Five Easy Pieces" and continued with "The King Of Marvin Gardens". In the three, Nicholson has now played son, brother and father. In this one, Nicholson is a wealthy wine dealer who has distanced himself from his wife with his philandering and from his son with his negligence. After he steals a diamond necklace with the help of a safecracker partner, Victor, things start coming apart. His wife sets out...

Eulis 'Sonny' Dewey is a preacher from Texas living a happy life with his beautiful wife Jessie. Suddenly his stable world crumbles: Jessie is having an affair with young minister Horace. Sonny gets enraged and hits Horace with a softball bat, putting him into a coma. After that he leaves town, takes a new name, 'Apostle E.F.' and goes to Louisiana. There he starts to work as a mechanic for local radio station owner Elmo, and Elmo lets him preach on the radio. E.F. starts to preach everywhere:...

Marshal W.T. O'Niel is assigned to a mining colony on Io, one of Jupiter's moons. During his tenure miners are dying - usually violently. When the marshal investigates he discovers the one thing all the deaths have in common is a lethal amphetamine-type drug, which allows the miners to work continuously for days at a time until they become "burned out" and expire. O'Niel follows the trail of the dealers, which leads to the man overseeing the colony. Now O'Niel must watch his back at every turn,...

While travelling to visit their grandfather, two children are told the story of a family curse that has lasted two hundred years. During Napoleon's Italian invasion, Elisabetta Benedetti fell in love with French soldier Jean - but while Jean was distracted, Elisabetta's brother Corrado stole some gold that Jean was guarding, and set the curse in train. The Benedettis become wealthy, corrupt and hated by their former friends, who rename them the Maledettis - the cursed. The childrens' grandfather...

In 1931 Paris, Anais Nin meets Henry Miller and his wife June. Intrigued by them both, she begins expanding her sexual horizons with her husband Hugo as well as with Henry and others. June shuttles between Paris and New York trying to find acting jobs while Henry works on his first major work, "Tropic of Cancer," a pseudo-biography of June. Anais and Hugo help finance the book, but June is displeased with Henry's portrayal of her, and Anais and Henry have many arguments about their styles of...

The hairdresser, wife and mother Cynthia Kellogg is in police department being interrogated by the experienced detective John Woods and his partner, Detective Linda Nealon. Through flashbacks, she reveals how her best friend and colleague Joyce Urbanski married the scum and nasty James Urbanski; how hard Joyce's life with James was; and why Joyce became a criminal. The smart detective finds some contradictions in her statement and presses Cynthia, trying to disclose the truth of two murders.

David and Linda Howard are successful yuppies from LA. When he gets a job disappointment, David convinces Linda that they should quit their jobs, liquidate their assets, and emulate the movie Easy Rider, spending the rest of their lives travelling around America...in a Winnebago! (This is a kind of large, luxurious mobile home which suits a 1980's yuppie more than the counterculture dropout approach of Easy Rider.) His idealized, unrealistic plans soon begin to go spectacularly wrong.

Robert Cole, a film editor, is constantly breaking up with and reconciling with long-suffering girl friend Mary Harvard, who works at a bank. He is irrationally jealous and self-centered, while Mary has been too willing to let him get away with his disruptive antics. Can they learn to live with each other? Can they learn to live without each other? The movie also provides insight into film editing as Robert and co-worker Jay work on their current project, a cheesy sci-fi movie.