An ambitious carnival man with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychologist who is even more dangerous than he is.
A woman learns about the death of her Orthodox Jewish father, a rabbi. She returns home and has romantic feelings rekindled for her best childhood friend, who is now married to her cousin.
A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
During China's Tang dynasty the emperor has taken the princess of a neighboring province as his wife. She has borne him two sons and raised his eldest. Now his control over his dominion is complete, including the royal family itself.
When two single parents remarry, their teenaged son and daughter begin developing an unexpected attraction to each other.
The story of an old Jewish widow named Daisy Werthan and her relationship with her black chauffeur, Hoke. From an initial mere work relationship grew in 25 years a strong friendship between the two very different characters, in a time when those types of relationships were shunned.
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.
Spanning the years 1945 to 1955, a chronicle of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son, Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge.
A renowned New York playwright is enticed to California to write for the movies and discovers the hellish truth of Hollywood.
Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.
Montreal, 1940. The Second World War is raging in Europe. Pierre Sauvageau, 22, would like to enlist, but he has to take care of his twin sister, crippled from birth. This proximity awakens the sensuality of Berthe who tries to seduce her brother. Pierre rejects her advances, but when he falls in love with Marguerite, his best friend's girlfriend, he is haunted by the fantasy of his sister.
Orphan boy and vicar's daughter fall in love but her father is strongly opposed to their relationship.
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.
Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.
Lulu is a young woman so beautiful and alluring that few can resist her siren charms. The men drawn into her web include respectable newspaper publisher Dr. Ludwig Schön, his musical producer son Alwa, circus performer Rodrigo Quast, and seedy old Schigolch. When Lulu's charms inevitably lead to tragedy, the downward spiral encompasses them all.
The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.
A successful and married black man contemplates having an affair with a white girl from work. He's quite rightly worried that the racial difference would make an already taboo relationship even worse.
Homer is an orphan who was never adopted, becoming the favorite of orphanage director Dr. Larch. Dr. Larch imparts his full medical knowledge on Homer, who becomes a skilled, albeit unlicensed, physician. But Homer yearns for a self-chosen life outside the orphanage. What will Homer learn about life and love in the cider house? What of the destiny that Dr. Larch has planned for him?
In the slums of the upper West Side of Manhattan, tensions are high as a gang of Polish-Americans compete against a gang of recently immigrated Puerto Ricans, but this doesn't stop two romantics from each gang falling in love.
In 1943, while the Allies are bombing Berlin and the Gestapo is purging the capital of Jews, a dangerous love affair blossoms between two women – one a Jewish member of the underground, the other an exemplar of Nazi motherhood.