In the beginning of the 19th century, Johannes Elias Alder is born in a small village in the Austrian mountains. While growing up he is considered strange by the other villagers and discovers his love of music, especially rebuilding and playing the organ at the village church. After experiencing an "acoustic wonder", his eye color changes and he can hear even the most subtle sounds.
Young love and childish fears highlight a year in the life of a turn-of-the-century family up to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
A woman’s lover and her ex-boyfriend take justice into their own hands after she becomes the victim of a rapist. Because some acts can’t be undone. Because man is an animal. Because the desire for vengeance is a natural impulse. Because most crimes remain unpunished.
The brief life of Jean Michel Basquiat, a world renowned New York street artist struggling with fame, drugs and his identity.
September of 1944, a few days before Finland went out of the Second World War. A chained to a rock Finnish sniper-kamikadze Veikko managed to set himself free. Ivan, a captain of the Soviet Army, arrested by the Front Secret Police 'Smersh', has a narrow escape. They are soldiers of the two enemy armies. A Lapp woman Anni gives a shelter to both of them at her farm. For Anni they are not enemies, but just men.
Anaïs is twelve and bears the weight of the world on her shoulders. She watches her older sister, Elena, whom she both loves and hates. Elena is fifteen and devilishly beautiful. Neither more futile, nor more stupid than her younger sister, she cannot understand that she is merely an object of desire. And, as such, she can only be taken. Or had. Indeed, this is the subject: a girl's loss of virginity. And, that summer, it opens a door to tragedy.
In 1843, despite the fact that Dickens is a successful writer, the failure of his latest book puts his career at a crossroads, until the moment when, struggling with inspiration and confronting reality with his childhood memories, a new character is born in the depths of his troubled mind; an old, lonely, embittered man, so vivid, so human, that a whole world grows around him, a story so inspiring that changed the meaning of Christmas forever.
A character study of a family on vacation. The emotional abyss and problems are behind the seemingly nice facade of an intact family as they experience guilt, love, and jealousy.
Lili, a pouty and voluptuous 14-year-old, is caravan camping with her family in Biarritz. She's self-aware and holds her own in a café conversation with a concert pianist she meets, but she has a wild streak and she's testing her powers over men, finding that she doesn't always control her moods or actions, and she's impatient with being a virgin. She sets off with her brother to a disco, latching onto an aging playboy who is himself hot and cold to her. She is ambivalent about losing her virginity that night, willing the next, and determined by the third.
Eight very different couples deal with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London.
In a vibrant tapestry of love and longing, nine interconnected souls navigate romance and heartbreak in L.A., where passions collide and truths unfold, revealing that the heart's desires often lead us where we least expect.
After the death of his mother, a young boy calls a radio station in an attempt to set his father up on a date. Talking about his father’s loneliness soon leads to a meeting with a young female journalist, who has flown to Seattle to write a story about the boy and his father.
A woman moves into a Manhattan apartment, where she learns that the previous tenant's life ended under mysterious circumstances.
A woman convinces her boyfriend to go to couple therapy with her friend's and things go downhill from there.
Vittorio, an American novelist teaching in Rome, meets the beautiful but damaged Bianca and they rapidly fall into an urgent, tempestuous affair. He's hesitant over their relationship since she seems to thrive on conflict and is constantly baiting him into physical altercation. Bianca gives Vittorio an exquisite leather belt as a gift; he knows immediately that she wants him to whip her with it. Driven by his craving for her, Vittorio complies to Bianca's desire. Their relationship escalates into a dark realm of S&M which becomes more and more self-destructive.
A woman catches her husband in bed with a much younger lady. Shocked and distraught, the woman leaves her husband. She decides to embark on a road trip of erotic self discovery. The woman meets a cartoonist during her sensual pilgrimage and gets involved in a torrid sexual affair with him.
This is the story of two male prostitutes who want to become professional actors and how they struggle to get into show business.
Long years of separation have made sisters Loida and Lina strangers to each other. So much so that when cruel fate makes their paths cross anew, it is by way of one man's love Willie's. As unsuspecting of the two women are, of their familial affinities, Willie gets caught in the what seems a sticky situation. Especially as Loida and Lina finally and eventually find the truth about themselves. Love and life can be as hot and sticky as rice cakes, indeed!
After the death of the paranoid emperor Tiberius, Caligula, his heir, seizes power and plunges the empire into a bloody spiral of madness and depravity.
While visiting her sister in Paris, a young woman finds romance and learns her brother-in-law is a philanderer.