The lives of two lovelorn spouses from separate marriages, a registered sex offender, and a disgraced ex-police officer intersect as they struggle to resist their vulnerabilities and temptations.
A ruthless real estate agent discovers a passion for piano and auditions with help from a young virtuoso, but the pressures of his corrupt career threaten to derail his musical aspirations.
Various experiences of childhood are seen in several sequences that take place in the small town of Thiers, France. Vignettes include a boy's awakening interest in girls, couples double-dating at the movies, brothers giving their friend a haircut, a boy dealing with an abusive home life, a baby and a cat sitting by an open window, a child telling a dirty joke, and a boy who develops a crush on his friend's mother.
Born on a sharecropping plantation in Northern Florida, Ray Charles went blind at seven. Inspired by a fiercely independent mom who insisted he make his own way, He found his calling and his gift behind a piano keyboard. Touring across the Southern musical circuit, the soulful singer gained a reputation and then exploded with worldwide fame when he pioneered coupling gospel and country together.
Erika Kohut, a sexually repressed piano teacher living with her domineering mother, meets a young man who starts romantically pursuing her.
Charlie is a former classical pianist who has changed his name and now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers, Richard and Chico, surface and ask for Charlie's help while on the run from gangsters they have scammed, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie and Lena, a waitress at the same bar, face trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.
An ordinary funeral procession moves along its path from church to cemetery. Observing, you slip from reality into a place where time has lost its linearity, looping through the odd images thrown off by a distorted reality. Images of non-existence, of varying reflections of death issuing from both past and future, concrete yet abstract, horrible yet desirable. A family asks a young psychiatrist to be their guest for a while to untangle the circumstances of their father's illness. He's developed a suicidal fixation for ropes and knots among other things. While deeply involved in analyzing the patient's delirium, the doctor begins to lose track of what is taking place. The task of "how to help" is twisted into "who am I? Doctor or patient? Chance guest, member of this suffering family, or a catholic priest who has dreamed this all up?" In order to get a handle on it all, it's best to start from the beginning, but why do things keep shifting, changing?
Bilike has never seen a ping-pong ball before. He and his family live without electricity and running water in a solitary tent home among the vast steppe grasslands. The magnificent landscape here has changed little since the days of Genghis Kahn. But life in the middle of nowhere can be exciting for a young boy. The smallest of details become big events for curious Bilike and his best friends Erguotou and Dawa. The mystery of the small white ball floating in the creek leads to questions about the world around them, as well as innocent mischief.
After the mysterious death of their young son, a couple desperately flees to a remote lake house to escape the unrelenting haunting following them only to discover the mysterious entity is still very much a part of their lives.
When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.
A posthumous look at the last days of Guenther's life as he, his best friend, and his sister let loose on a four-day binge of alcohol, drugs, and sex.
Tobi and Achim, the pride of the local crew club, have been the best of friends for years and are convinced that nothing will ever stand in the way of their friendship. They look forward to the upcoming summer camp and the crew competition. Then the gay team from Berlin arrives and Tobi is totally confused. The evening before the races begin, the storm that breaks out is more than meteor-logical.
A philistine in the art film business, Jeremy Prokosch is a producer unhappy with the work of his director. Prokosch has hired Fritz Lang to direct an adaptation of "The Odyssey," but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb at the box office, he brings in a screenwriter to energize the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.
Ashley was raised in a picture perfect all-American family with two moms, two grandpas, two uncles, and a little brother. But Ashley has a problem, she has a crush on a boy at school, which is against everything this world has ever taught her.
A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.
The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.
The daughter of jazz pianist Joe Albany witnesses her beloved father's struggle -- and failure -- to kick his heroin habit.
Pianist David Helfgott, driven by his father and teachers, has a breakdown. Years later he returns to the piano, to popular if not critical acclaim.
Two young Nicaraguan children, Saslaya and her mute brother Dario, must travel to Costa Rica to find their long-lost mother.
Lyrical biography of the classical composer, depicted as a romantic hero, an accursed artist.