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.
Manhattan explores how the life of a middle-aged television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.
During the final weeks of a presidential race, the President is accused of sexual misconduct. To distract the public until the election, the President's adviser hires a Hollywood producer to help him stage a fake war.
Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.
A young fighter named Kham must go to Australia to retrieve his stolen elephant. With the help of a Thai-born Australian detective, Kham must take on all comers, including a gang led by an evil woman and her two deadly bodyguards.
Takizawa Bakin, a popular Edo period author, begins to recount a story he is planning in front of his friend, the artist Katsushika Hokusai. The story is about eight warriors who, each carrying a jewel, gather together as if guided by fate and embark on a harsh journey to fight the curse of the Satomi family. Hokusai is drawn into the story that Bakin is telling, and visits Bakin on various occasions to hear the rest of the story, and a strange relationship between the two begins. The serialization becomes Bakin's life's work, with the idea of "rewarding good and punishing evil in a world where evil is rampant," but after 28 years, as the story finally approaches its climax, Bakin begins to lose his sight. With the completion of the story in doubt, he receives an unexpected proposal from his daughter-in-law. Will the story ever be completed?
Set in 1951, a blacklisted Hollywood writer gets into a car accident, loses his memory and settles down in a small town where he is mistaken for a long-lost son.
In 1965, a young woman with dreams of becoming a writer has a son at the age of 15 and struggles to make things work with the drug-addicted father.
The story of an imaginative boy who pretends he is the child of a sperm-laden Sicilian tomato upon which his mother accidentally fell.
While looking for new tenants for his seaside villa, surrounded by a big garden, Andrea Ricoli, a 50-years old architect, meets Rossana, a newly 40-years old, anaesthesiologist at the local hospital, and married to Riccardo, ten years younger than her: he's an aspiring writer, temporarily employed as a salesman at a local shoe store. During an eventful New Year's Eve, Andrea introduces Riccardo to a Maghreb restaurant owner - who is interested in restoring an attic apartment - and his lovely sister Hikma. Months go by. Andrea discovers that Hikma is pregnant with Riccardo's child, while she's struggling with her old-fashioned, fundamentalist brother's mentality. He offers to help the couple and let them stay with him in his villa. Teaching him how to care for his garden, the young Hikma reminds Andrea of his wife Sofia, who passed away right there four years earlier, in unclear circumstances...
A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.
Grady is a 50-ish English professor who hasn't had a thing published in years—not since he wrote his award winning 'Great American Novel' 7 years ago. This weekend proves even worse than he could imagine as he finds himself reeling from one misadventure to another in the company of a new wonder boy author.
In 1920s rural Mississippi, Nancy Mannigoe, an African-American servant, is placed on death row for the murder of Temple Drake's infant child. Temple, the daughter of the governor, pleads with her father to exonerate Nancy of the charges, explaining that Nancy acted in haste to prevent her from resuming her affair with a roguish Cajun called Candy Man. Details of Temple's sordid past are uncovered as she begs mercy for her faithful servant.
A celebration of love and creative inspiration takes place in the infamous, gaudy and glamorous Parisian nightclub, at the cusp of the 20th century. A young poet, who is plunged into the heady world of Moulin Rouge, begins a passionate affair with the club's most notorious and beautiful star.
Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.
Jean Claude Van Damme plays a dual role as Alex and Chad, twins separated at the death of their parents. Chad is raised by a family retainer in Paris, Alex becomes a petty crook in Hong Kong. Seeing a picture of Alex, Chad rejoins him and convinces him that his rival in Hong Kong is also the man who killed their parents. Alex is suspicious of Chad, especially when it comes to his girlfriend.
In 1920s China, 19-year-old Songlian becomes a concubine of a powerful lord and is forced to compete with his three wives for the privileges gained.
In 1934, while traveling to Stockholm, where he is about to receive the Nobel Prize, the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello recalls his life and his relationship with the loved ones who have inspired his art.
New York, 1929, a war rages between two rival gangsters, Fat Sam and Dandy Dan. Dan is in possession of a new and deadly weapon, the dreaded "splurge gun". As the custard pies fly, Bugsy Malone, an all-round nice guy, falls for Blousey Brown, a singer at Fat Sam's speakeasy. His designs on her are disrupted by the seductive songstress Tallulah who wants Bugsy for herself.
Thomas is turning 16. His dad's in the army and they've just moved to a town in New South Wales; his mom is pregnant; his older brother, Charlie, who's autistic, has his own adolescent sexual issues. Thomas finds Charlie an embarrassment in public, so when Thomas is attracted to Jackie, a girl in his swim class, Charlie presents any number of obstacles when she drops by their house, when the three of them go for a walk, and during a family birthday dinner. Can Thomas find a way to enter the world of teen romance and still be his brother's keeper, or is Charlie's disability going to prove more than Thomas can handle?