Goodbye Paradise

Harry Mitchell is a successful Los Angeles manufacturer whose wife is running for city council. His life is turned upside down when three blackmailers confront him with a videotape of him with his young mistress and demand $100,000. Fearing that the story will hurt his wife's political campaign if he goes to the police, Harry pretends that he will pay the men, but does not follow through.

Yasha recently retired after serving many years at a factory, with a highlight of his career being a delegate of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1976. Yet his future is left unknown when he emerges in new realities that he finds difficult to accept. The world has changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet he tries to hold on to what once was. Thus enters former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Appearing like Yasha’s alter ego, he guides Yasha, giving amusing commentary and voicing what Yasha should say or do. Brezhnev’s presence gives way for more historical leaders that Yasha idolises to arrive. Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Josip Broz Tito and Erich Honecker, and even the African dictator Jean Bedel-Bokassa all make an appearance! When Yasha takes an oath of loyalty to them, this creates trouble for his family.

John Rosow drinks to forget. He is a former New York City cop turned Chicago-based private investigator. At the last minute, he is hired by someone he's never met to follow a middle-aged male subject on the soon-departing California Zephyr train to Los Angeles.

Peppino is an aging taxidermist constantly ridiculed for being short and somewhat creepy. He meets Valerio, a handsome young man fascinated by Peppino's work. Peppino, in turn, becomes entranced by Valerio and offers him a large salary to come work as his assistant. But when Valerio meets Deborah, their fledgling romance is threatened by an insanely jealous third wheel.

Leftist radical-turned-terrorist Giorgio—who fled to Latin America in the '70s to escape justice—decides to surrender after hearing about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Determined to lead a comfortable, bourgeois life in his native Italy, he cuts a deal with a shady police chief, getting his sentence reduced in exchange for ratting out former comrades. Once released, Giorgio obsessively pursues his dream of becoming a "respectable" citizen, even if the way is paved with larceny, pimping, drug-dealing, rape, heist, and murder...

This psychedelic tour of life after death is seen entirely from the point of view of Oscar, a young American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo with his prostitute sister, Linda. When Oscar is killed by police during a bust gone bad, his spirit journeys from the past - where he sees his parents before their deaths - to the present - where he witnesses his own autopsy - and then to the future, where he looks out for his sister from beyond the grave.

Lew is a small time loser with a troubled past and a very big secret. Overhearing a couple plan a kidnapping, Lew is tempted to come up with a scheme of his own. He decides to get to the victim first and then blackmail the real criminals. His plan soon spins out of control.

Betty has a crush on her tennis instructor Mike. He promises to call her for a date, but never does – she doesn’t know he sells drugs on the side. After botching a deal on someone else’s turf, Mike has to disappear for a while. He contacts Betty – then he’s killed before they can meet. Betty tries to find out what happened, leading her straight into a hornet's nest of vice.

The nameless journalist from Murder in the Dark receives two shocks in quick succession. First, his good friend Kurt is murdered, and then his editor-in-chief sends him to the provinces! Here, a prostitute has been killed at the brothel "Paradise." An apparently insane knife attacker has been arrested. But there is something fishy about the whole thing. A picture of the arrested man's attractive defense attorney entices our hero, and he is thus swept into a series of exciting events that take him behind the city's pretty facade...

Enforcing the law within the notoriously rough Brownsville section of the city and especially within the Van Dyke housing projects is the NYPD's sixty-fifth precinct. Three police officers struggle with the sometimes fine line between right and wrong.

A psychiatrist comes to the aid of a compulsive gambler and is led by a smooth-talking grifter into the shadowy but compelling world of stings, scams, and con men.