The Showcase Revue

The 20 January 1931 slaying of Julia Wallace remains unsolved, despite an ongoing stream of investigative writers giving an impression that a solution to the crime has been found through a surfeit of working hypotheses.

A laundry-folding machine has been possessed by a demon, causing it to develop homicidal tendencies.

A conflicted youth confesses to crimes he didn't commit while a man and woman aroused by death become obsessed with each other.

Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is sweeping the country. It's spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment.

Adult brothers Mark and Colin Pollock still live with their parents Frank and Mavis Pollock in a small apartment in the projects of London's east end in what is a collective depressed and unhappy existence. The three men of the household are all on the dole, each doing little to find gainful employment. Between the brothers, Mark is the smart aleck, who calls his parents by their given names to irk them, and who hangs out with a bunch of hooligans as he refers to himself and his friends, such as a skinhead named Coxy. Although never medically diagnosed as such, Colin is seemingly emotionally slow. Colin likes to hang out with Mark and his friends in his want to be accepted, especially as Mark tells him that a neighborhood girl named Hayley is interested him. The family rarely socializes with Mavis' sister and brother-in-law, Barbara and John, who live a middle to upper middle class and seemingly perfect existence in the suburbs of Chigwell. Although not telling them to their face, John dislikes his relations by marriage, believing especially Mark to be brash and trashy. A unilateral act by Barbara leads to many issues within the extended family coming to the surface, most specifically the true happiness of the marriage between Barbara and John, and what Colin is truly looking for to be happy in life.

A young street hustler attempts to escape the rigors and temptations of the ghetto in a quest for a better life.

Joe Buck is a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy New York City women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida.

Under the watch of his unkind realtives, lonely Bosse's luck is changed when he is sent to the land where his real father is the King. In that country, he sets out on a quest, together with his new friend, to destroy the evil Knight Kato.

Years after her Indian family was forced to flee their home in Uganda, twentysomething Mina finds herself helping to run a motel in the faraway land of Mississippi. It's there that a passionate romance with the charming Black carpet cleaner Demetrius challenges the prejudices of their conservative families and exposes the rifts between the region's Indian and African American communities.

Lady X is a woman who works during the day as a model but turns into a fighter for justice at night with the help of her karate master Chang.

George is a small-time crook just out of prison who discovers his tough-guy image is out of date. Reduced to working as a minder/driver for high class call girl Simone, he has to agree when she asks him to find a young colleague from her King's Cross days. That's when George's troubles just start.

1981 film by Dušan Makavejev

A husband and wife and their youngest son are murdered in this true story. Their two other sons are left to cope with their loss, but the local sherrif begins to suspect that one of the brothers committed the crime, and must convince the other to help him discover the truth.

Dorothy Parker remembers the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of friends whose barbed wit, like hers, was fueled by alcohol and flirted with despair.

Composer, conductor and teacher Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky struggles against his homosexual tendencies by marrying, but unfortunately he chooses a wonky, nymphomaniac girl whom he cannot satisfy.

1985 film by Stephen Frears

1993 British film directed by Mike Leigh

Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.

1975 film directed by Robert Altman

When a young woman investigates her town's Nazi past, the community turns against her.