In small-town Texas, affable and popular mortician Bernie Tiede strikes up a friendship with Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow well known for her sour attitude. When she becomes controlling and abusive, Bernie goes to great lengths to remove himself from her grasp.
John, a first-time filmmaker, finds himself in Lansing, Michigan to present his film at a local film festival. Vince, his high school friend who is now a volunteer fireman and small-time drug dealer, also visits the town to support John on his big day, or so it seems. After a raucous hello and much backslapping, it appears that there is an undercurrent of tension in the air.
A murderer in the middle of a killing spree enlists a reporter to interview him as he prepares to finish sacrificing his victims to his god.
Prizefighter Jimmy Nolan, facing an opportunity to get a championship fight, is knocked out when he sustains what is apparently a permanent injury to his arm. From there, Nolan's path leads downhill. He is drawn into a romance with a nightclub entertainer, then is framed on a theft charge by a jealous suitor. After his prison term, Nolan makes a spectacular comeback in a fight which proves his courage and integrity, while disproving the fallacy about the old sports adage that "they never come back."
Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk about his life and war campaigns in Africa.
On the eve of his execution, a vice-rackets bigshot recalls his various exploits in crimes such as abortion and white slavery, in which he frequently operated under an alias.
An obscure actor is hired by the police to get a confession out of a dying mafioso.
Jerry McGill slipped from a rock'n'roll career into a life of crime, robbing banks and running from the FBI while touring with legends of country music and appearing in movies. After three jail sentences (under two different names), aged 70 and suffering from terminal cancer, he announced his return to music. We follow a gun-toting McGill and his fiance Joyce through four states as he steals whatever's not nailed down and charms his way into and out of trouble. But when you point a camera at a man who will do anything for notoriety, how responsible are you when he goes too far?
London lawyer Owen Lockhart inherited a distant uncle's grand but run-down Cornish coastal estate and moves in with the intent to sell it. Senior constable Maxwell Breckett's wife Adele, his late uncle's secretary, hopes to change Owen's mind by rallying local clients and hiring as cook foxy local agricultural engineer Holly Heston, fatherless boarding school pupil Toby's single mother. She's in love with constable Lucas Corbin, the only one into whom she confided a grim family secret, but he finds out about her fast-budding affair with Owen.
In 1959, in Romania, six former members of the nomenclature and the secret police organize a hold up of the National Bank. After their arrest, the state forces them to play themselves in a film which reconstitutes the crime and the investigation. At the end of their trial, filmed live, they are sentenced to death and executed. except the women, Monica Sevianu that due to the fact that she had 2 children she was punished to do hard work for life.
It's an iconic line in any crime story: when a suspect is arrested and gets to make one call. In reality, once a person enters the criminal justice system, there are multiple opportunities to make calls while awaiting trial. The vast majority of those calls are recorded. An admission, a threat, a slip of the tongue, a bribe -- it's all on tape and the suspect knows it, but this doesn't always prevent people from talking and talking. Jailhouse phone calls are used to frame the narrative of murder investigations steeped in mystery.
