Desperate Lives

Burglary. Drugs. Assault. Rape. The students at Brandel High are more than new Principal Rick Latimer bargained for. Gangs fight to control the school using knives - even guns - when they have to. When Latimer and the head of security try to clean up the school and stop the narcotics trade, they run up against a teenage mafia. A violent confrontation on the campus leads to a deadly showdown with the drug dealer's gang, and one last chance for Latimer to save his career... and his life.

After he and his first wife separate, journalist David Sheff struggles to help their teenage son, who goes from experimenting with drugs to becoming devastatingly addicted to methamphetamine.

A high school basketball player’s life turns upside down after free-falling into the harrowing world of drug addiction.

When principal Joe Clark takes over decaying Eastside High School, he's faced with students wearing gang colors and graffiti-covered walls. Determined to do anything he must to turn the school around, he expels suspected drug dealers, padlocks doors and demands effort and results from students, staff and parents. Autocratic to a fault, this real-life educator put it all on the line.

Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.

The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island residents are shattered when their addictions run deep.

A logger defends his family from a group of dangerous drug runners.

A quiet, stoic man, lives a monk-like existence in self-imposed exile. When his estranged son is killed in a drug deal gone bad, he is left to look after a granddaughter he never knew existed, and he is forced back into a life he tried to put behind him.

A group of high-school friends must come to terms with the fact that one of them, Samson, killed another, Jamie. Faced with the brutality of death, each must decide whether to turn their friend in to the police, or to help him escape the consequences of his dreadful deed.

After their mother suffers a fatal overdose, two sisters fear being separated by the foster system and decide to hide her body. But when their lie risks being exposed, they must decide how far they’re willing to go to keep their secret.

The story of how George Jung, together with the Medellín Cartel led by Pablo Escobar, established the billion-dollar cocaine empire in the United States in the 1970s.

The story of a precocious six year-old and her ragtag group of friends whose summer break is filled with childhood wonder, possibility and a sense of adventure while the adults around them struggle with hard times.