Aspiring Florida defense lawyer Kevin Lomax accepts a job at a New York law firm. With the stakes getting higher every case, Kevin quickly learns that his boss has something far more evil planned.

Long separated from his family, hitman Joshua returns to Brighton Beach for a contract killing for the Russian Mafia. His abusive father, Arkady, banned him from returning after Joshua committed his first murder. He takes up residence in a hotel, and soon everyone knows he has returned. He goes home to visit his dying mother, Irina, and prepares for the assassination, getting drawn back into the criminal community he left behind.

The Colony, which shares the screen and the character of Shirin Neshat's Land of Dreams, is about an immense research institute devoted to recording and archiving the dreams of the local population.

Simin is an Iranian woman on a journey to discover what it means to be a free American. She works for the Census Bureau which, in an effort to control its citizens, has begun a program to record their dreams. Unaware of this devious plot, Simin is torn between her compassion for those whose dreams she is recording and a truth she must find within.

Three stories. We see, but little is explained. In "The Married Couple," a salesman pays a call on an old customer who is with his wife in the upstairs bedroom of their ill adult son. Another salesman may beat him to the punch, but not before disorienting changes. A maid scrubs the floor. "In the Penal Colony": a man arrives at a penal colony where an officer demonstrates a bizarre apparatus, one that punches a message into the skin of a prisoner strapped beneath it. Who will be punished? In "Fratricide," a man is murdered at night by someone he knows well. A woman grieves.