Swann (Jeremy Irons), an eligible bachelor in the best circles of fin-de-siècle Paris, has also some more vulgar but rich friends, the Verdurins. Through them he meets Odette (Ornella Muti), a courtesan, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. She seems to enjoy his company, for which he pays, but considers herself free to socialise and sleep where she pleases, particularly with a rival called de Forcheville. Swann’s passion turns to consuming jealousy, which leads him eventually to accept the social stigma of marrying her. One old friend, the overtly gay Charlus (Alain Delon), stays sympathetic.
Paris, France, December 1897. The young playwright Edmond Rostand feels like a failure. Inspiration has abandoned him. Married and father of two children, desperate and penniless, he persuades the great actor Constant Coquelin to perform the main role in his new play. But there is a problem: Coquelin wants to premiere it at Christmas and Edmond has not written a single word.
In 1891, the French painter Paul Gauguin leaves Paris and travels to Tahiti to renew his art as a free man, far from the European artistic conventionalism. On his journey of discovery, he faces solitude and disease, but he also knows the beauty of wild nature and the love of Tehura, a young native girl who becomes his wife and model.
In 19th century Baltimore, Isabel Porter, a girl stricken with grief from her parents' untimely death, voluntarily checks herself into the Rosewood Institute. Subjected to bizarre and increasingly violent pseudo-scientific experiments in personality modification, brainwashing and mind control, she must escape the clutches of the Rosewood and exact her revenge, or else be forever lost.
Ten years after the Civil War has ended, the Governor of Texas asks Leander McNelly to form a company of Rangers to help uphold the law along the Mexican border. With a few veterans of the war, most of the recruits are young men who have little or no experience with guns or policing crime.
A young Venezuelan idealist flees his native land to escape a revolution. Hoping to find peace, he goes to the mountains and the forests of the Amazon. There he encounters Rima, the Bird Girl, an orphan living a life of nature. It is all an admirable romance telling a tale of "quest, love, and violence."
Agnes MacDonnell, a strong and self-confident Englishwoman, owns a large estate on an island off the west coast of Ireland. When she begins a passionate but dangerous affair with her new estate manager, Agnes wages a desperate struggle to dominate this charismatic but destructive man.
An outwardly confident but unmarried woman on the verge of her fortieth birthday reflects on her past suitors and the choices she once made while attempting to help her marriage minded niece choose between a number of potential suitors in this tale inspired by the life and letters of Jane Austen. Jane Austen is about to turn forty, but she still hasn't found her ideal man. When Jane is approached by her niece Fanny and asked to help select the perfect husband for the young girl, the aging spinster begins to wonder why it is that she never found a man to share her own life with. Perhaps if Jane had accepted the proposal of a wealthy landowner she could have saved her family from financial ruin, and what of the handsome young physician who once warmed to Jane after tending to her ailing family members?
The charismatic Sir Lionel Frost considers himself to be the world's foremost investigator of myths and monsters. Trouble is, none of his small-minded, high-society peers seems to recognize this. Hoping to finally gain acceptance from these fellow adventurers, Sir Lionel travels to the Pacific Northwest to prove the existence of a legendary creature known as the missing link.