On the Black Hill

Chinatown, San Francisco, 1928. Former private detective Dashiell Hammett, a compulsive drinker with tuberculosis who writes pulp fiction for a living, receives an unexpected visit from an old friend asking for help.

Khaila Richards, a crack-addicted single mother, accidentally leaves her baby in a dumpster while high and returns the next day in a panic to find he is missing. In reality, the baby has been adopted by a warm-hearted social worker, Margaret Lewin, and her husband, Charles. Years later, Khaila has gone through rehab and holds a steady job. After learning that her child is still alive, she challenges Margaret for the custody.

Coral Atkins, a British soap star of the 1970s, becomes deeply affected by the plight of children from troubled homes. Against considerable odds, Coral harnesses her celebrity to launch a crusade to establish her own home to care for the children. Based on the memoirs of Coral Atkins.

A spirited young woman finds herself destitute and on the streets before joining a traveling carnival, where she meets a vagabond painter.

In the midst of the Great Depression, manipulative emcee Rocky enlists contestants for a dance marathon offering a $1,500 cash prize. Among them are a failed actress, a middle-aged sailor, a delusional blonde and a pregnant girl.

A race of giant Gastropods has taken over the planet Jaconda. Their leader, Mestor, now intends to cause an enormous explosion in order to spread his people's eggs throughout the galaxy, and he kidnaps juvenile twin geniuses from Earth to work out the necessary mathematical equations. Space fighters led by Lieutenant Hugo Lang are dispatched to get the twins back, but they come under attack and Lang is the sole survivor when his ship crashes on the asteroid Titan III. A newly regenerated Doctor and Peri become involved and help Jaconda's elderly former ruler Professor Edgeworth, who is really a Time Lord named Azmael, to defeat Mestor and free the planet's bird-like indigenous people from the gastropods' reign of terror. Azmael, however, sacrifices his life in the process.

In Fujisawa, Sakuta Azusagawa is in his second year of high school. Blissful days with his girlfriend and upperclassman, Mai Sakurajima, are interrupted by the appearance of his first crush, Shoko Makinohara.

Clint Barkley first sees Smoky as a runaway, and drives him back to the ranch where he meets the owner, Julie Richards. He is given a job on her ranch, but the head cowhand is doubtful about Clint and fears that since he refuses to talk about himself, he must have some dreadful secret in his past. Clint and Smoky become close to each other, weathering the hardships of Western life and the suspicions of others together, until one day, Smoky tragically vanishes. Will Clint ever see him again?

Jackie Brown is a flight attendant who gets caught in the middle of smuggling cash into the country for her gunrunner boss. When the cops try to use Jackie to get to her boss, she hatches a plan — with help from a bail bondsman — to keep the money for herself.

The radical new take on Dickens’ classic seeks both to exhume the original story’s gritty commentary on social inequality and the corrupting influence of greed, and to breathe new life into the lyricism of the original text by setting its scenes to extraordinary tableaux of modern dance.