Big Night

Paris, 1964. The Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, one of the most accomplished and respected artists of his generation, asks his friend, the American writer James Lord, to sit for a portrait, assuring him that it will take no longer than two or three hours, an afternoon at the most.

In an attempt to resurrect the slapstick comedy of Laurel and Hardy or The Marx Brothers, Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt team-up as two out-of-work actors who accidentally stow away on a ship to hide from a drunken, belligerent lead actor who has sworn to kill them for belittling his talents.

Affected by tragedy, a married couple decide to role play a blind date.

Around 1940, New Yorker staff writer Joe Mitchell meets Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village character who cadges meals, drinks, and contributions to the Joe Gould Fund and who is writing a voluminous Oral History of the World, a record of 20,000 conversations he's overheard. Mitchell is fascinated with this Harvard grad and writes a 1942 piece about him, "Professor Seagull," bringing Gould some celebrity and an invitation to join the Greenwich Village Ravens, a poetry club he's often crashed. Gould's touchy, querulous personality and his frequent dropping in on Mitchell for hours of chat lead to a breakup, but the two Joes stay in touch until Gould's death and Mitchell's unveiling of the secret.

To be or not to be, etc.

An 11-year-old girl watches her father come down with a crippling depression. Over one summer, she learns answers to several mysteries and comes to terms with love and loss.

A woman arrives in a fictional Central American country that is on the verge of revolution and inexplicably imagines it is the place where she will be reunited with her fugitive 19-year-old daughter.

Waking up in a nearly empty room, Bill has strange recollections of his father's death and a car crash, and occasional paranoid delusions. Ann, a psychologist, tries to help him make sense of it all.