Madrid, 1924. A ne'er-do-well in his 30s, perpetual disappointment to his aging military father, hatches a plan to rob the mail train to Andalusia. He intends the hit to be bloodless, but complications arise soon.
Chili Palmer is a Miami mobster who gets sent to L.A. to collect a bad debt from Harry Zimm, a Hollywood producer who specializes in cheesy horror films.
In 1990s New York, an undercover police officer receives an assignment to lure and arrest gay men. However, he's surprised to discover a scintillating connection with one of his targets.
When two young lovers are savagely beaten and tortured on a back country road in Texarkana, local police are baffled and must find "the Phantom Killer" before he can kill again.
A disgraced sports presenter falls victim to an accidental head trauma and slips into a coma. He awakens months later to find that South Africa was not as he left it, he is now in the New South Africa, and his multimillion-Rand idea has been stolen from beneath him.
Claude, a militant anarchist, is caught stealing and is shot by a policeman while fleeing the scene. Dodo, a hairdresser, is hit by one of the stray bullets.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.
Somewhere in Los Angeles, the city of broken dreams, a stripper is murdered. Now, the private detective she had hired and her ex-footballer boyfriend are going to find her murderer.