A Dream of Living

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.

Latvia in the 1920s. The enterprising Edgars Ceplis establishes a company to produce bricks from Latvian clay for export. Many are involved in his project, hoping for the huge profits the venture promises. Ceplis soon becomes infatuated with his office typist Austra Zīle and starts neglecting the business...

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.

A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.

Set in 1929, a political boss and his advisor have a parting of the ways when they both fall for the same woman.

Paris 1913. Coco Chanel is infatuated with the rich and handsome Boy Capel, but she is also compelled by her work. Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is about to be performed. The revolutionary dissonances of Igor's work parallel Coco's radical ideas. She wants to democratize women's fashion; he wants to redefine musical taste. Coco attends the scandalous first performance of The Rite in a chic white dress. The music and ballet are criticized as too modern, too foreign. Coco is moved but Igor is inconsolable.

Based on the murder of nine street peddlers in the aftermath of the Great Kanto earthquake.

In the late 1920s, Albert Fish, a seemingly benevolent father and grandfather who reared his family by himself after his wife deserted them, turns out to be a serial child molester and murderer. Based on a true story.

In 1934, as playwright Luigi Pirandello travels to Stockholm, where he is about to receive the Nobel Prize, he begins reliving the drama and magic of the loved ones who have populated his life and inspired his art. Pirandello reminisces about the madness of his wife, his stormy relationship with his children, his controversial stance towards fascism, and his love for Marta Abba, the young actress who became his muse.

Artist Charles Ryder runs into aristocrat Julia Flyte and recalls his friendship with her eccentric family prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Based on the classic British novel by Evelyn Waugh.

A domineering but charismatic rancher wages a war of intimidation on his brother's new wife and her teen son, until long-hidden secrets come to light.

On a tour of Britain in 1926, Harry Houdini enters into a passionate affair with a psychic out to con the famous magician.

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 group of Boston-bred gangsters set up shop in balmy Florida during the Prohibition era, facing off against the competition and the Ku Klux Klan.

Mame Dennis, a progressive and independent woman of the 1920s, is left to care for her nephew Patrick after his wealthy father dies. Conflict ensues when the executor of the father's estate objects to the aunt's lifestyle and tries to force her to send Patrick to prep school.

Set during the period of growing influence of the Indian independence movement in the British Raj, the story begins with the arrival in India of a British woman, Miss Adela Quested, who is joining her fiancé, a city magistrate named Ronny Heaslop. She and Ronny's mother, Mrs. Moore, befriend an Indian doctor, Aziz H. Ahmed.

The story is about Iris's rise to the apex of a love/power triangle that includes her roguish English lover, McHeath, and Art, an earnest young boxer. Within the flawed moral landscape, each character struggles to establish their sovereignty.

In 1928, Amelia Earhart gains fame by undertaking a transatlantic flight as a passenger. In 1937, she and her navigator Fred Noonan undertake her longest flight: a round-the-world attempt. However, the plane disappears in the process.

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.

Two jobless Americans convince a prospector to travel to the mountains of Mexico with them in search of gold. But the hostile wilderness, local bandits, and greed all get in the way of their journey.