Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.
Many loosely connected characters cross paths in this film, based on the stories of Raymond Carver. Waitress Doreen Piggot accidentally runs into a boy with her car. Soon after walking away, the child lapses into a coma. While at the hospital, the boy's grandfather tells his son, Howard, about his past affairs. Meanwhile, a baker starts harassing the family when they fail to pick up the boy's birthday cake.
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.
An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy who died after an ambiguous accident. His wife is crucified by her desperation to make him desire her: but he resists the affections of his wife. His reunion with his father—who is dying of cancer—jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.
The family of a wealthy businessman gather to celebrate his 60th birthday. During the course of the party, his eldest son presents a speech that reveals a shocking secret.
The young Harold lives in his own world of suicide-attempts and funeral visits to avoid the misery of his current family and home environment. Harold meets an 80-year-old woman named Maude who also lives in her own world yet one in which she is having the time of her life. When the two opposites meet they realize that their differences don’t matter and they become best friends and love each other.
In director Baz Luhrmann's contemporary take on William Shakespeare's classic tragedy, the Montagues and Capulets have moved their ongoing feud to the sweltering suburb of Verona Beach, where Romeo and Juliet fall in love and secretly wed. Though the film is visually modern, the bard's dialogue remains.
A drama about a Maori family living in Auckland, New Zealand. Lee Tamahori tells the story of Beth Heke’s strong will to keep her family together during times of unemployment and abuse from her violent and alcoholic husband.
"Olivia" captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress Julie and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Julie and the other head of the school Cara in its final months.
Director helmut Dietls and Patric Susskinds illustrate a legendary story of two lovers who cant keep themselves away from death.
When a grieving couple go to a "rental family" agency to hire an actor to role-play their dead son, they discover that their evening of remembrance is more than they bargained for.
The film narrates a tormented love story between one of the most famous poets of Serbian literature, Laza Kostic, renowned for his sublime poetic puns and word coining and an enchanting young girl by the name of Lenka Dundjerski, an educated and refined daughter of a landowner Lazar Dundjerski. Standing in the way of their love is the insurmountable age gap between the two, as Kostic is 29 years older than his beloved one. The affair inspired one of the most sophisticated and tender love poems of the time, an utmost expression of yearning, in which the poet's unflinching devotion is linked to his admiration for a Venice basilisk by the name of Santa Maria della Salute.
Loosely based on a rape case that happened to two sisters in Cebu, Visayas, Philippines in late 1990s.
And death and life she hated equally, And nothing saw, for her despair, But dreadful time, dreadful eternity, No comfort anywhere
The strange comedy film of two close brothers; one, Wilbur, who wants to kill himself, and the other, Harbour, who tries to prevent this. When their father dies leaving them his bookstore they meet a woman who makes their lives a bit better yet with a bit more trouble as well.
Two men answer the call of the ocean in this romantic fantasy-adventure. Jacques and Enzo are a pair of friends who have been close since childhood, and who share a passion for the dangerous sport of free diving. Professional diver Jacques opted to follow in the footsteps of his father, who died at sea when Jacques was a boy; to the bewilderment of scientists, Jacques harbors a remarkable ability to adjust his heart rate and breathing pattern in the water, so that his vital signs more closely resemble that of dolphins than men. As Enzo persuades a reluctant Jacques to compete against him in a free diving contest -- determining who can dive deeper and longer without scuba gear -- Jacques meets Johana, a beautiful insurance investigator from America, and he finds that he must choose between his love for her and his love of the sea.
Everyone is addicted to Lulu. As a symbol of the seductress, she drags everyone around her into the abyss: the elderly Dr. Goll, the mediocre painter Schwarz, her foster father Dr. Schön and the lesbian Countess Geschwitz - all succumb to her beauty and pay with their lives.
Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and her breast cancer diagnosis. In the last stage of her life, she meets a young journalist from Tokyo who wants to write a story on her life.
A young man's drive to avenge for his sister and brother.
Two men share an odd friendship while they care for two women who are both in deep comas.