Return of the Secaucus Seven
Lianna
Baby, It's You
The Brother from Another Planet
Matewan
Eight Men Out
City of Hope
Passion Fish
The Secret of Roan Inish
Lone Star
Men with Guns (Hombres Armados)
Limbo
Sunshine State
Casa de los Babys
Silver City
Honeydripper

Lianna (Linda Griffiths) and her best friend Sandy (Jo Henderson) are seated together on a bench near a public playground, watching their children and talking, helping each other cope with the challenge of being faculty wives at a small liberal arts college in New Jersey.

Lianna has the heaviest cross to bear: she is married to Dick Massey (Jon De Vries), a charismatic English professor who also teaches film classes. They married when Lianna was still an undergraduate, and the domineering style that works well for Dick in the classroom is beginning to wear thin at home. Lianna often finds herself consoling her children, Spencer (Jesse Solomon) and Theda (Jessica Wight MacDonald), after they have been verbally one-upped by their father.

Lianna's life is a succession of domestic errands and boring faculty parties, leavened by occasional awkward encounters with a genial and flirtatious film professor, Jerry (John Sayles), who is her husband's chief academic rival. Lianna seeks intellectual stimulus two nights a week in a college extension child-psychology course taught by another idolized older professor, Ruth (Jane Hallaren).

Lianna approaches Ruth after class one evening to inquire about a research project she has described to her students. Is there an opening for a research assistant? Teacher and student agree to meet to discuss the project, and the conversation delays Lianna's arrival at yet another English-department soiree. Taking a short cut to the party through the host's backyard, Lianna is shocked (but not surprised) to see her husband romping in the sandbox with a coed. At home later that night, she confronts him with sandy evidence, and their son can hear them screaming at each other from all the way downstairs.

Claiming that he "needs time to think," Dick decamps to a film festival for a few days. Lianna leaves her kids alone at home and goes to Ruth's house for dinner, ostensibly to discuss the research project. But as Lianna enjoys her wine and relaxes with the older woman, suppressed memories of her adolescent attractions to women drift to the surface. Ruth kisses Lianna, she responds, and they end up making love. Returning home in the wee hours Lianna discovers that Spencer has been having an "orgy" of his own, with a stash of skin magazines.

Swimming with Ruth at the college pool a few days later, Lianna begins to come to terms with the fact that in public their relationship will have to be concealed. Because they cannot risk a PDA that even heterosexual high school kids could probably get away with, Ruth and Lianna caress each other verbally.

Marooned a few days later at another dull faculty party, Lianna finds herself more impatient than ever with chirpy graduate students like Kim (Nancy Mette), who is writing her thesis on the films of "tragic hero" Audie Murphy. At home, Lianna recklessly reveals her attachment to Ruth, and Dick seizes the opportunity to regain the moral high ground in their ongoing conflict, and orders her out of the house. For the first time she finds herself looking for work and an apartment of her own, setting up shop as an independent adult at the age of 33.

Sandy is taken aback when Lianna tells her about Ruth, but Lianna misses the signals at first because she is overjoyed by the discovery she has made about herself. She has to firmly fend off a clumsy seduction attempt from Jerry, but she also visits a gay bar for the first time, and on the street she finds herself suddenly alive to the attractiveness of many different kinds of women.

But, at the same time, Dick is making things as difficult as possible, using the circumstances of the separation to limit Lianna's access to their children. And Ruth, who has her career to consider, warns Lianna that they will not be able to live together or to be open about their relationship. And Lianna begins to realize that she is losing touch with Sandy, whose husband Bob, (Stephen Mendillo), the college football coach, assures Lianna that her friend misses her and is wrestling with mixed feelings.

Ruth is uneasy about Lianna's pattern of being attracted to older authority figures; she is unwilling to exploit the imbalance of power in the relationship, as Dick has done. As Ruth is drawn back into a previous bond with a woman closer to her own age, and leaves for a few days to try to sort things out, Lianna returns to the gay bar and leaves with Cindy (Betsy Julia Robinson), an NCO in the Army Air Corps. Perhaps it will be possible after all to carry on without Ruth.

If anything, Lianna finds her estrangement from her friend Sandy even harder to bear than the break with Ruth. There are signs, however, that Sandy is coming around. She shares her feelings with Jerry and finds his relaxed attitude reassuring. "I'm from California," he explains. "That stuff doesn't faze me."

When Ruth finally leaves for good, Lianna works up the courage to approach Sandy and sit beside her on their old bench near the playground in the park, hoping that at least this one good relationship can remain strong, even though everything else in her life has been turned upside down.