American Playhouse

Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s, comes down with a debilitating illness with no clear diagnosis.

Jaime Escalante is a mathematics teacher in a school in a hispanic neighbourhood. Convinced that his students have potential, he adopts unconventional teaching methods to try and turn gang members and no-hopers into some of the country's top algebra and calculus students.

In this Shakespearean farce, Hero and her groom-to-be, Claudio, team up with Claudio's commanding officer, Don Pedro, the week before their wedding to hatch a matchmaking scheme. Their targets are sharp-witted duo Benedick and Beatrice -- a tough task indeed, considering their corresponding distaste for love and each other. Meanwhile, meddling Don John plots to ruin the wedding.

Errol Morris's unique documentary dramatically re-enacts the crime scene and investigation of a police officer's murder in Dallas.

Traces over three generations an immigrant family's trials, tribulations, tragedies, and triumphs. Maria and Jose, the first generation, come to Los Angeles, meet, marry, face deportation all in the 1930s. They establish their family in East L.A., and their children Chucho, Paco, Memo, Irene, Toni, and Jimmy deal with youth culture and the L.A. police in the '50s. As the second generation become adults in the '60s, the focus shifts to Jimmy, his marriage to Isabel (a Salvadorian refugee), their son, and Jimmy's journey to becoming a responsible parent.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte by Georges Seurat is one of the great paintings of the world, and in "Sunday in the Park with George," book writer James Lapine and composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim bring a story based on the work brilliantly to life. While the painting depicts people gathered on an island in the Seine, the musical goes beyond simply describing their lives. It is an exploration of art, of love, of commitment. Seurat connected dots to create images; Lapine and Sondheim use connection as the heart of all our relationships. Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Originally broadcast as part of "American Playhouse" on PBS (season five, episode nineteen).

Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life.

Connie, the fifteen-year-old black sheep of her family, finds her summertime idyll of beach trips, mall hangouts, and innocent flirtations shattered by an encounter with a mysterious stranger.

It is just another day in the small town of Hamlin until something disastrous happens. Suddenly, news breaks that a series of nuclear warheads has been dropped along the Eastern Seaboard and, more locally, in California. As people begin coping with the devastating aftermath of the attacks — many suffer radiation poisoning — the Wetherly family tries to survive.

During the summer of 1981, a group of friends in New York are completely unprepared for the onslaught of AIDS. What starts as a rumor about a mysterious "gay cancer" soon turns into a major crisis as, one by one, some of the friends begin to fall ill, leaving the others to panic about who will be next. As death takes its toll, the lives of these friends are forever redefined by an unconditional display of love, hope and courage.

A man wakes up in an alley, bleeding and with no memory of who he is. He stumbles into a coffee shop and is befriended by a charitable ex-nun who is failing in her attempts to write marketable pornography.

An international award winning saga of old Mexico. In 1528, a Spanish expedition flounders off the coast of Florida with 600 lives lost. One survivor, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, roams across the American continent searching for his Spanish comrades. Instead, he discovers the Iguase, an ancient Indian tribe. Over the next eight years, Cabeza de Vaca learns their mystical and mysterious culture, becoming a healer and a leader. But soon this New World collides with the Old World as Spanish conquistadors seek to enslave the Indians, and Cabeza de Vaca must confront his own people and his past.

In a woods filled with magic and fairy tale characters, a baker and his wife set out to end the curse put on them by their neighbor, a spiteful witch.

In 1902, an African-American family living on a sea island off the coast of South Carolina prepares to move to the North.

This film adaptation of James Baldwin's celebrated novel tells the journey of a family from the rural South to "big city" Harlem seeking both salvation and understanding and of a young boy struggling to earn the approval of a self-righteous and often unloving stepfather.

Dennis is a handsome and bookish college student. His brother, Bill, is a roughhewn ladies' man and thief. Together they search for their dad, confront their expectations of each other, themselves, and their attitudes towards women.

In 1940s Chicago, a young black man takes a job as a chauffeur to a white family, which takes a turn for the worse when he accidentally kills the teenage daughter of the couple and then tries to cover it up.

A reporter at a local Florida newspaper is torn between his friendship with a corrupt real estate developer and his love for an activist opposing the developer's latest project.

Married couple, Ethan and Zeena, are in need an extra hand around the house due to Zeena's debilitated body and constant illness. The young woman who joins them is a beautiful, spirited person. She and Ethan fall in love much to the dismay of Zeena.

Twelve-year-old Mexican-American Marcos (Jose Alcala) recalls the hardships of the previous year, reflecting on the arduous trek his migrant-worker family made from Texas to the Midwest during harvest season. Along the way, Marcos learns plenty about the harsh realities of bigotry and the power of family in America of the 1950s. The coming-of-age Chicano drama is based on Tomas Rivera's semiautobiographical 1971 novella.