In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.
The story of Ace Eli Walford, a 1920s stunt flyer who barnstorms around the country, taking his eleven-year-old son Rodger with him as he goes from town to town. The place is rural Kansas, and the time is midsummer in the early nineteen-twenties, not long after World War I. Eli (Cliff Robertson), a barn storming pilot who has the emotional make-up of an 11-year-old, and Rodger (Eric Shea), his 11-year-old son who possesses the wisdom of the ancients, set off to see the world, which means flying all the way to San Willow. To Eli, San Willow seems to be as fabled as Xanadu and quite as remote. In essence, "Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies" is about the adventures of Rodger and Eli getting from nowhere to nowhere. Eli, a killer with the ladies at first, always leaves them unsatisfied. He seems to have a sex problem. Rodger spends a lot of his time getting his dad out of scrapes. He also drinks, smokes and goes to sleep at night crying for his deceased mom.
A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.
When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one—until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.
'Sugar' Ray is the owner of an illegal casino and must contend with the pressure of vicious gangsters and corrupt police who want to see him go out of business. In the world of organised crime and police corruption in the 1920s, any dastardly trick is fair.
In 1920s China, 19-year-old Songlian becomes a concubine of a powerful lord and is forced to compete with his three wives for the privileges gained.
An aged Charlie Chaplin narrates his life to his autobiography's editor, including his rise to wealth and comedic fame from poverty, his turbulent personal life and his run-ins with the FBI.
February 1927: Félix Leclerc's last year with his family before attending a private college in the fall. Accompanied by Fidor, his faithful friend, he will face adversity, love, death, and will embark on the path of adulthood.
Michael Collins plays a crucial role in the establishment of the Irish Free State in the 1920s, but becomes vilified by those hoping to create a completely independent Irish republic.
Harlem's legendary Cotton Club becomes a hotbed of passion and violence as the lives and loves of entertainers and gangsters collide.
New York, 1929, a war rages between two rival gangsters, Fat Sam and Dandy Dan. Dan is in possession of a new and deadly weapon, the dreaded "splurge gun". As the custard pies fly, Bugsy Malone, an all-round nice guy, falls for Blousey Brown, a singer at Fat Sam's speakeasy. His designs on her are disrupted by the seductive songstress Tallulah who wants Bugsy for herself.
Murderesses Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart find themselves on death row together and fight for the fame that will keep them from the gallows in 1920s Chicago.
In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
Because of the power of love, the last year of Franz Kafka's life becomes his happiest. The well-known writer has never before been able to allow himself to experience intimacy, he suffers from tuberculosis and is dependent on his overbearing family. In the summer of 1923, he met Dora Diamant in the seaside resort Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea coast, where he is convalescing and she is working in a Jewish Volksheim. He is a man of world, the 14 years younger woman is from the deep East, he can write, she can dance. She has both feet firmly on the ground, he is always hovering a little above it. She embraces the indicative, he gets tangled up in the conjunctive. But the worldly wise Dora accepts him as he is. And he accepts her. Together they go to Berlin and when Franz's health deteriorates rapidly, to a sanatorium in Austria. They are granted a single year together until Franz Kafka's health deteriorates incurable. However their year together allows them to feel the glory of life.
Somewhere in Australia in the early 20th century outback, an Aboriginal man is accused of murdering a white woman. Three white men are on a mission to capture him with the help of an experienced Indigenous man.
In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastic story about 5 mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality starts to blur as the tale advances.
A British medical doctor fights a cholera outbreak in a small Chinese village, while also being trapped at home in a loveless marriage to an unfaithful wife.
A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.
The hidden memoir of an elderly woman confined to a mental hospital reveals the history of her passionate yet tortured life, and of the religious and political upheavals in Ireland during the 1920s and 30s.