Summary:

Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti) meet and become friends while caring for women they love in a coma clinic. Benigno is a male nurse taking care of Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dancer he barely knows but became infatuated with just before the accident that put her in a coma four years ago. Marco is a journalist who was trying to interview Lydia (Rosario Flores), a famous female bullfighter, when they fell for each other. Soon afterward, she is badly gored in the bullring and winds up in a coma in the same clinic as Alicia.

Benigno’s care of Alicia in her comatose state is extremely devoted. He talks to her constantly, and he goes to movies he thinks she would have liked and tells her about them. Alicia’s dance mentor (Geraldine Chaplin) also talks to her, and Benigno urges Marco to do the same with Lydia, but Marco is unable to talk to Lydia, whom he thinks of as already dead (there is reason to think that she is, in fact, more gravely injured than Alicia).

Benigno’s caring goes well beyond talking. He tells Marco that he wants to marry Alicia. He also gives Alicia intimate massages, and finally the hospital staff discover that he has impregnated her. He is fired and sent to jail, where he takes his own life. In the end, while Lydia dies, Alicia comes out of her coma to deliver the child, which is stillborn. Marco’s last words to Benigno, at Benigno’s grave: "Alicia is alive. You woke her up."

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Summary:

After seven years of research on children and adolescents diagnosed as "juvenile delinquents," psychiatrist Wertham concluded that crime comic books (mysteries, thrillers, horror, and police stories) are a harmful influence on young minds. In fourteen chapters, rife with the logic of comparison from the adult world, he analyzed the problem literature, its artwork, its advertising, and the so-called "educational messages" it contained.

Against the evidence of various "experts" and the champions of civil liberties, numerous anecdotes demonstrate how comic books glorify violent crime, link sexual love with physical abuse, permit illiteracy, and invite imitation. A series of vignettes demonstrates that violent child crime is on the rise and that actual crimes--even murder--have been connected to the reading of comics.

Wertham also provided statistics on comic book publishing, finances, and influence. A penultimate chapter is devoted to television. Emphasizing the public initiatives and legislative controls brought against American comics in other countries, such as Canada, Britain, Italy, Mexico, and Sweden, he demands action before yet another generation of youth is ruined.

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Summary:

Following the death of an aphasic hermit woman in the woods of North Carolina, it is discovered that she is survived by a daughter (Jodie Foster), a young woman who lives by herself as a kind of wild child, speaking a private language, and intensely fearful of human contact. The authorities decide that she must be normalized for her own good, but Dr. Jerry Lovell (Liam Neeson) disagrees, arguing that, although different, she is fine and has not asked for help. He insists on getting her informed consent before treatment. A judge agrees to give Lovell three months to observe the woman, whose name turns out to be Nell, and find evidence that she should not be treated against her will.

Lovell recruits a partner, psychologist Paula Olsen (Natasha Richardson), and together they set up an observation base on a houseboat with a view of Nell's cabin. From there Lovell makes a series of attempts to win Nell's confidence and understand her language. (Olsen for much of the film mainly represents a set of professional values more conservative that Lovell's unconventional therapeutic moves--which, for example, make her suspect that he is sexually attracted to Nell. Her own sexual presence, while downplayed, serves to defuse this potential.)

Lovell wins Nell's confidence (she calls him her "guardian angel") and the secrets of her speech and wounded psyche (a twin sister died young, and Nell has apparently at least witnessed sexual abuse). Following a court hearing in which Nell speaks in her own defense, the world gets word of her case and journalists descend on her remote cabin on foot and by helicopter.

Fearing that civilization will destroy Nell, Lovell arranges to have her hospitalized as the least available evil. However, when he finds her drugged, he sees that hospitalization is no solution, and he carries Nell out of the hospital and back to her cabin. He tries to make her understand that he is not her guardian angel.

The film switches to a warmly-lit lakeside scene five years later, when all problems seem to have been solved. Lovell and Olsen, who are married with a little girl, and several other sympathetic characters are picnicking with Nell near her cabin, and Nell is shown entranced and somehow emotionally fulfilled in being with the child, who is the age at which her twin sister died.

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Summary:

Lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) comes to town preying on the grief of the citizens who have lost their children or seen them harmed when a school bus slid off the road and sank through a frozen lake. He encounters a network of secrets and distorted perceptions of blame, guilt, lies, and victimhood revealed by flashbacks. Grieving the loss of his challenged son, the sinister but simple motel keeper, Wendell (Maury Chaykin), warns Stephens off the case, blaming parents, children, drivers, and the road. He does not know that his wife has been sleeping in one of the vacant rooms with a good-looking widower whose son and daughter both drowned.

The Otto family, especially the mother (Arsinée Khanjian) are destroyed by the loss of their beloved adopted son, a smiling native child, called Bear. They are confused. On the one hand, they want nothing because their loss was accidental; on the other, they want vengeance because someone must be blamed for their overwhelming pain. The bus driver, Dolores, who has lost so many of "her kids" seems not to have grasped the full extent of the tragedy or the possibility that all could be blamed on her.

And yet it could. The crucial evidence is the speed at which she took the last downhill curve. The key witness is a teenager, Nicole (Sarah Polley), who sat just behind the driver and survived the accident as a paraplegic. Her father is eager for her to testify, hoping for a large settlement. It slowly emerges that his seemingly close relationship with Nicole before the accident was incestuous. Now she is seething with anger toward him--because of his past abuse? or because of his present abandonment? or both? She claims that Dolores was driving too fast. The case collapses. Stephens later sees Dolores driving a group of seniors.

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Summary:

The film covers a brief period in the life of a working-class English family: Mum (Tilda Swinton), Dad (Ray Winstone), their 18-year-old daughter, Jessie (Lara Belmont), and 15-year-old Tom (Freddie Cunliffe). They have recently moved from London to an isolated cottage on the Dorset coast. Mum gives birth to a baby girl, Alice. Tom discovers that Dad is sexually abusing Jessie. When the baby is hospitalized with an unexplained injury, apparently genital, Tom tells Mum about the incest, and when Dad confronts him and denies it, Tom stabs him.

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Summary:

Told from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl, this story about a single mother with two daughters who moves, marries, and dies of breast cancer handles a variety of difficult issues with sensitivity and spunk. A list of those issues--absent father, new stepfather, a thousand-mile move to a new social environment, first menstruation, sibling rivalry, an uncle with incestuous impulses, family secrets, sexual experimentation, cancer, and death--might make it sound like a catalogue of the trials of contemporary suburban young adulthood, but in fact the point of view of Tilden, the main character, keeps the story grounded in very believable, sometimes amusing, often poignant, recognizable truth about what it is to come into awareness of the hard terms of adult life.

The mother's cancer is narrated largely in terms of Tilden's experience of it: secrecy, eventual disclosure, partial information, losses of intimacy, feelings of betrayal, confusion about caregivers' roles, and in the midst of it all, the ordinary preoccupations of early adolescence. The generous and understanding stepfather and neighbors with limited but ready sympathies lighten some of the novel's darker themes.

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Summary:

When Gerald is three, his mother, a drug addict, leaves him alone one time too often and he accidentally sets the apartment on fire. His mother is imprisoned for negligence, he goes to the hospital, and thereafter lives with "Aunt Queen," a great-aunt who exercises considerable authority from her wheelchair, and gives him all the love his mother hasn't.

When he is 9, however, his mother returns with a new sister and a man who claims to be the sister's father. They want to take him "home"; Gerald wants to stay with Aunt Queen. The matter is settled unhappily when Aunt Queen dies of a heart attack.

Gerald soon learns to despise his stepfather for his violence and, eventually, for the abuse of his half sister, which she hides out of fear until she's driven to confess it to Gerald in hope of his protection. Their mother remains in denial about that problem as well as her own and her husband's addictions to alcohol and drugs.

Caring for his sister, however, keeps love in Gerald's life. In defending her one last time, the apartment catches fire and his stepfather is killed. As he, his sister, and his mother ride away in the ambulance, a flicker of hope survives in the darkness for another new chapter in family life, this time without violence.

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Summary:

Gabriel Noone, a late-night radio personality ("Noone at Night" on PBS) who reads his semi-autobiographical stories to millions of Americans, has just separated from his lover Jess when a publisher sends him the proofs of a memoir written by a 13-year-old boy with AIDS. Peter, the young author, has suffered heinous sexual abuse from his parents and hoards of strangers; he lives with his adoptive mother Donna, who was his therapist. Gabriel, shaken by the memoir, calls Peter, a conversation (all via phone, almost all at night) that begins a relationship that quickly becomes an intense, father-son-like relationship that grows deeper as it grows more unsettling as Jess and others begin to cast suspicion on the actual existence of Peter.

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Summary:

Sally Wang, the 27-year-old daughter of highly educated (her widowed mother is a Yale professor) immigrant parents, quits her job as an art director in New York City. Her depression leads her to a suicide attempt and admission into a mental hospital, where she begins to come to terms with her memories of sexual abuse by her father (the "Monkey King"). Continuing to struggle with the need to cut herself as a way of feeling alive, Sally begins to re-explore her relationship to the world through her painting and begins shattering well-kept family secrets on her way towards healing.

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Summary:

Raina is 17, living alternately on the streets with a boyfriend addicted to hard drugs and at home with an abusive mother, also an addict. She has been victimized by a succession of her mother's live-in boyfriends and lost a young brother to an accidental overdose: he swallowed some of his mother's pills while the mother slept and seven-year-old Raina was watching him.

Margaret Johnson is 45, Raina's teacher at an underfunded, overcrowded public school where Raina's life of squalor is more typical than not. Her own story is told in chapters that alternate with Raina's story and with the texts of autobiographical compositions Raina gives her but refuses to discuss. Only when Raina finds herself pregnant, shortly after her boyfriend has been killed in a drug-related accident, does she take Ms. Johnson up on her repeated offers of help.

She lives at the teacher's home for awhile, runs away to her own home, unused to kind treatment and afraid she'll disappoint the teacher and be thrown out, goes to a shelter, has her baby, and finally returns, having nowhere to go. Ms. Johnson, with some hesitation, takes her and the baby in and the three begin to work out a life together, knowing it will involve difficult change, but willing to bet on love against the odds.

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