Places in the Heart

Coleman Silk is a worldly and admired professor who loses his job after unwittingly making a racial slur. To clear his name, Silk writes a book about the events with his friend and colleague Nathan Zuckerman, who in the process discovers a dark secret Silk has hidden his whole life. All the while, Silk engages in an affair with Faunia Farley, a younger woman whose tormented past threatens to unravel the layers of deception Silk has constructed.

Over-the-hill gumshoe in Los Angeles seeks to avenge the killing of an old pal, another detective who had gotten himself involved in a case concerning a murdered broad, stolen stamps, a nickel-plated handgun, a cheating dolly, and a kidnapped pussycat.

When one of his patients is found murdered, psychiatrist Dr. Sam Rice is visited by the investigating officer but refuses to give up any information. He's then visited by the patient's mistress, Brooke Reynolds, whom he quickly falls for despite her being a likely murder suspect. As the police pressure on him intensifies, Rice decides to attempt solving the case on his own and soon discovers that someone is trying to kill him as well.

The film is an attempt to evoke, through paintings, the world of a small Texas town in an era long gone. The paintings are freely based on photographs, letters, and postcards, discovered hidden in a cigar box in the family barn by director Robert Benton, and dealing entirely with a courtship between his grandfather's brother, who was the local mailman, and a young woman who came to visit her relatives in Waxahachie, Texas, in the summer of 1909. They met, fell in love, got married, and shortly after the marriage, she died.

Sully is a rascally ne'er-do-well approaching retirement age. While he is pressing a worker's compensation suit for a bad knee, he secretly works for his nemesis, Carl, and flirts with Carl's young wife Toby. Sully's long- forgotten son and family have moved back to town, so Sully faces unfamiliar family responsibilities. Meanwhile, Sully's landlady's banker son plots to push through a new development and evict Sully from his mother's life.

In the year 1935, a teen named Billy Bathgate finds first love while becoming the protégé of fledgling gangster Dutch Schultz.

Ted Kramer is a career man for whom his work comes before his family. His wife Joanna cannot take this anymore, so she decides to leave him. Ted is now faced with the tasks of housekeeping and taking care of himself and their young son Billy.

A retired ex-cop and private detective gets mixed up in murder when he is asked to deliver blackmail money and walks into a 20 year old case involving the mysterious disappearance of an actress' former husband.

Hairdresser Nadine Hightower wants to retrieve the risqué photos she once posed for, but when she visits the photographer at his office, he's murdered by an intruder. Nadine talks her estranged husband, Vernon, into going along when she returns to the office, where they stumble across plans for a less than legal construction project. But when Vernon tries to turn the documents into a cash windfall, he and Nadine are pursued by goons with guns.

A meditation on love and its various incarnations, set within a community of friends in Oregon. It is described as an exploration of the magical, mysterious and sometimes painful incarnations of love.