In a struggling post-Soviet community, Lilya a teenage girl is abandoned when her mother moves to the United States with her boyfriend. Facing neglect and poverty, she meets Andrei, who offers her a job in Sweden, giving her hope for a better life — and a journey that will change everything.
A gallery of characters in Brooklyn in the 1950s are crushed by their surroundings and selves: a union strike leader discovers he is gay; a prostitute falls in love with one of her clients; a family cannot cope with the fact that their daughter is illegitimately pregnant.
A pimp with no other means to provide for himself finds his life spiralling out of control when his prostitute is sent to prison.
In the 1950s, brothers Jacey and Doug Holt, who come from the poorer side of their sleepy Midwestern town, vie for the affections of the wealthy, lovely Abbott sisters. Lady-killer Jacey alternates between Eleanor and Alice, wanting simply to break the hearts of rich young women. But sensitive Doug has a real romance with Pamela, which Jacey and the Abbott patriarch, Lloyd, both frown upon.
A Peruvian teen lusts after his wild sister while the new wife of their difficult, wealthy father tries to hide her lower-class background.
An aspiring poet in 1950s New York has his ordered world shaken when he embarks on a week-long retreat to save his hell raising hero, Dylan Thomas.
A destitute Frank Sinatra pursues sultry starlet Ava Gardner while campaigning for the lead in 'From Here to Eternity'.
Andrian and Ivan are two brother-sailors who worked in Arkhangelsk as a carved artists. And so, at the end of August they decided, like loons, to go to the island. When the men were already far away in the sea, they moored to a small patch of land and began to have a dinner. After the dinner they decided to go to sleep and go home in the morning. But they could not even imagine what disaster awaited them in the night.
Cynical British journalist Fowler falls in love with a young Vietnamese woman but is dismayed when a naïve U.S. official also begins vying for her attention. In retaliation, Fowler informs the communists that the American is selling arms to their enemy.
Angie, a poverty-stricken young mother, is taking care of her son and alcoholic mother when she is evicted from her house. Now she has to get money from the only person she knows with any - the man who abused her as a child.
The crew of a bankrupt Scottish trawler turn to smuggling illegal immigrants over the stormy waters of the North Sea.
Primo and Secondo, two immigrant brothers, pin their hopes on a banquet honoring Louis Prima to save their struggling restaurant.
During an innocent game in an abandoned amusement park, a member of the group dies. Narrated by one of the children, the film follows the kids as they struggle to balance their own ambitions and relationships against a tragic lie.
A humble family receives a real Greek gift: a luxury car, which cannot be sold for two years. To make matters worse, no one knows how to drive. Time passes, and the automobile ends up having quite unusual uses.
"Baba" is a bitter melodrama set in Istanbul. A father is not able to earn enough money to feed his family. He is waiting to emigrate to Germany. When his landlord's son kills a man while drunk, the father is prepared to answer for the deed himself, provided that the landlord supports his wife and children. As there is little difference for the father between ten years in prison or ten years in a foreign country, he regards this to be the best solution.
A chronicle of the rise and brief career of rock 'n' roll star Buddy Holly, who aspires to play music the way he wants it to sound. Holly and his band, the Crickets, are first invited to record in Nashville, where they encounter creative differences with the producing staff. Later they play a major booking at the Apollo Theater, scheduled there under the mistaken assumption that they're a black band. Holly's career eventually goes solo -- until the tragic day the music dies.
A young prosecutor in postwar West Germany investigates a massive conspiracy to cover up the Nazi pasts of prominent public figures.
Dr. Jean Markham returns to the town she left as a teenager to take over her late father's medical practice. When a school-yard scuffle lands Charlie in her surgery, she invites him to visit the hives in her garden and tell his secrets to the bees, as she once did. The new friendship between the boy and the bee keeper brings his mother Lydia into Jean's world.
Glen doesn't dare tell his fiancée Barbara that he is a transvestite known as Glenda; in addition, Alan is undergoing medical treatment to become a woman named Anne; both stories are told by a psychiatrist.
Fashion icon Coco Chanel, steeped in wealth and fame, still issues game-changing designs and collections. The audience is taken backwards in time to the woman's upbringing in an orphanage, and traces her path to ubiquity as it winds through poverty, wars, doomed romances, and rather glamorous betrayals.