In 1942, a 10-year-old boy named Timmy plays with a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman when his mother walks in. She chastises him for it. The mother orders Timmy to get a plastic bag to "burn everything." Instead of her order, Timmy gruesomely murders her with an axe, then saws her body with a hacksaw.
Art Dodge (Antonio Banderas), a former artist, is struggling to make ends meet with his art gallery, ignoring bills and delaying to pay his assistant Gloria (Joan Cusack) and his artist Manny (Gabino Diego). To survive, he is reading the obituaries and trying to convince the widows that the deceased purchased a painting shortly before dying.
Magda (Penélope Cruz) is an unemployed teacher. She is diagnosed with breast cancer, and she battles the disease. This will create unexpected bonds with people close to her.
A plane crashes on an island, and the pilot comes across a giant spider, which kills both him and an alien. One year later, Mercer (Alex Reid), the sister of the pilot, accompanies Valentine (Chris Potter) to the same island to locate her brother. On the way to a native village to examine several natives who are dying of spider bites, ticks burrow into Reyes (Luis Lorenzo Crespo). Upon reaching the village, they discover that the village has moved on. Reyes begins to cough up the ticks and Bear (Rocqueford Allen) decides to shoot him to end his suffering.
A future post-apocalyptic world is ruled by the good-looking people. A terrorist group of disabled people, who see themselves as mutants, take arms against their oppressors. They plan to rid the world of "beautiful people" and superficiality. They are very inept at what they do and mistrust one another. They assassinate body builders, massacre an aerobics class on live TV and blow up a sperm bank as part of their violent campaign.
In Spain, the vanished six-year-old daughter of the editor Claudia (Emma Vilarasau) and her husband Marc is found completely mutilated in a well by the police, being recognized by her husband only due to a bracelet and leg defect (one legbone is shorter than the other). The body contains marks of many needle insertions and burns from sulfuric acid, which appear to have been inflicted while the child was still alive.
Pablo and Meca, two young urban delinquents, live from day to day by a series of robberies, mostly car thefts. During one such robbery, the car’s owner catches the two in the act. They roll up the windows and lock the doors to prevent intrusion. Helplessly trapped inside the troublesome vehicle by a mob that has now closed in around them, the pair forces a clear path through the crowd by brandishing a gun, before making their escape into the street. However, the stolen car only proves to be the first step in a more elaborate scheme. Spotting an attractive waitress named Ángela at a local cafeteria, Pablo is immediately captivated by the receptive (and equally restless) young woman, who soon becomes his lover, promising to stay together always. Pablo teaches Ángela to shoot a gun and, subsequently, inducts her into their gang after an afternoon of makeshift target shooting.
Marisa Paredes is Leocadia ("Leo") Macias, a woman writing popular romance novels under the pen name Amanda Gris. Unlike her romantic ("pink") novels, her own love life is troubled. Leo has a difficult relationship with her husband Paco (Imanol Arias), a military officer stationed in Brussels and later in Bosnia, who is distant both physically and emotionally. The film starts with Leo writing about the feeling of having lost her lover, a feeling that she compares to the pain of a tight pair of boots that she can't take off. Almodovar took for this first part of the film strong plot elements from Dorothy Parker's short story The Lovely Leave
Twenty years after his disappearance in 1908, an aged Butch Cassidy (Sam Shepard), living under the assumed name James Blackthorn in a secluded village in Bolivia, decides to end his long exile and return to the United States after learning of the death of Etta Place. He writes to her son, Ryan, who is in fact his own son, telling him he intends to return. After years of raising horses and living a solitary life, Blackthorn sets off for Potosí to sell his horses. He tells his lover, Yana (Magaly Solier), that he will see her again before leaving Bolivia.
Deux jeunes amis vivent une aventure insolite : ils doivent trouver la façon dont le Président de la compagnie où ils travaillent (et beau-père d'un des deux), revient sain et sauf chez lui par d'étranges circonstances. Il est retrouvé à moitié-nu enfermé dans le coffre de sa voiture. Parallèlement, un homme d'affaires croulant sous les dettes et son associé tentent de faire un kidnapping express, bien que, par une série de coïncidences malheureuses, ils finissent par séquestrer leur père par erreur. À partir de là, les problèmes ne font que commencer.
Alba (Elena Anaya) seduces a stranger Natasha (Natasha Yarovenko) to her hotel room in what seems merely a harmless sexual adventure crowning their last night in Rome.Tentatively, through weave of stories, sex, memories and connection with artworks in the room, the two connect deeply, descending more and more into the depths of truth, trust, and ultimately love. The lovers eventually agree to part ways, returning to their previous lives in Russia and Spain. The ending of the film remains ambiguous about their parting.
A young woman, Joana Prats, suffers from agnosia, a strange, primary visual disease that is one of the neuropsychological disorders of perception. Although her eyes and ears are in perfect condition, her brain is not able to correctly interpret the stimuli it receives. Joana is the only person to know an industrial secret left behind by her late father and becomes the victim of a sinister plan to extract this information. Her captors plan to use her sensory condition to help extract the information that they so desperately want.
Sexilia ("Sexi") is a pop star and sex addict; Riza is the gay son of the Emperor of Tiran (a fictional Middle Eastern country). Both are strolling around Madrid's flea market, aiming to pick up lovers. Sexilia takes two men for an orgy, where she is the only woman. In the hope of curing her nymphomania and her fear of the sun, she is undergoing psychotherapy. However, her psychoanalyst, Susana, is far more interested in sleeping with Sexila's father, Doctor de la Peña, a gynecologist specializing in artificial insemination. As the doctor is frigid, Susana does not have a chance with him. One of Doctor de la Peña's patients is Princess Toraya, the ex-wife of the former Emperor of Tiran. Flicking through a magazine, Toraya discovers that her stepson Riza Nero is also in town. Thanks to treatment by Sexilia's father, Toraya is now fertile for the first time in her life. Since the emperor's sperm is currently unavailable to her, she will settle for that of his son, Riza, whom she attempts to track down.
In the early 1970s, during the last years of Franco's dictatorship, ETA was a group of Basque using political violence in Spain under the leadership of Argi. Yoyes, a young independent woman, joins ETA in Ordizia, a small town in the Basque Country. She quickly plays an important role in ETA's organization. Yoyes meets Joxean, a philosophy student and they start a relationship.