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.
With no clue how he came to be imprisoned, drugged and tortured for 15 years, a desperate man seeks revenge on his captors.
A family loaded with quirky, colorful characters piles into an old van and road trips to California for little Olive to compete in a beauty pageant.
A middle-class family, on the surface happy and perfect, are close to disintegration due to the father's escalating alcoholism. After several years of failure and broken promises, they finally give him an ultimatum. However, they must soon recognize that the solution rests on everyone's shoulders.
Blind tragedy strikes the Orton family but a painful revelation opens their eyes to redemption.
A West Texas single mother wins the lottery and squanders it just as fast, leaving behind a world of heartbreak. Years later, with her charm running out and nowhere to go, she fights to rebuild her life and find redemption.
The story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a different time and place, all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.
Two estranged brothers born on the same day, five years apart, run into each other at their family vacation home with wildly different expectations for how their birthday weekend is going to play out.
As she tries to cope with the changes in Yugoslav rural life brought about by increasing modernization, the Widow Karolina wishes she had become a mother. As difficult as things are for her, they are nonetheless much more difficult for her more-conservative and less-thoughtful neighbors.
The true story of boxer Jim Braddock who, following his retirement in the 1930s, makes a surprise comeback in order to lift his family out of poverty.
Adriel, a father who tries to convey the truth behind his wife's condition to his daughter.
Ana, a young filipina filmmaker, shoots a re-enactment of a fight she once had with her mother - a fight brought on by mutual refusals to communicate. Echoing the cultural pressure from her mother to work beyond her natural limits, Ana rewrites every single insult into a chance for forgiveness. As the story of her film diverges further and further from the memory of what happened, she questions whether her creative additions amount to yet another repression of the truth.
In the wake of their parent's separation, three siblings spend the summer in the south of France with their estranged Grandfather. In less than 24 hours, a clash of generations has occurred between the teenagers and the old man. During this turbulent summer, both generations will be transformed by one another.
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.
A young man named Gabe has turned his back on the musical ambitions of his youth until he finds a cassette of songs his recently deceased brother wrote, which leads him on a journey through many relationships of his past and reminds him of why music was his passion in the first place.
The Talbots, formerly one of the Eastern Shore's first families, have gone to seed: Pap is a drunk, soddenly decaying in his ruined ancestral home, and three of his sons (William, Carol, and Ezra) are lazy, shiftless young men. Mulligan, Pap's second son who supports the entire family by oyster fishing, falls in love with wealthy Anna Lee, but when he first kisses her, she calls him "white trash."
Ben Sanderson, an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter who lost everything because of his drinking, arrives in Las Vegas to drink himself to death. There, he meets and forms an uneasy friendship and non-interference pact with prostitute Sera.
As the romantic monsoon rains loom, the extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last-minute arranged marriage in New Delhi. This film traces five intersecting stories, each navigating different aspects of love as they cross boundaries of class, continent and morality.
Mihajlo, an introvert piano teacher starts romance with a pretty careerist who teaches modeling at the university in Belgrade where they both work. His feelings are awakened after a long period, but this relationship makes him see the flashbacks, as well as yet unseen images that remind him of his troubled childhood - as if he experienced this already. When their university wins a contest to hold public TV performance, Mihailo fails to play the piano on the decisive night and she dumps him. The boiling point is about to come.
One family's experiences with life and death.