In the poverty-stricken favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, two young men choose different paths. Rocket is a budding photographer who documents the increasing drug-related violence of his neighborhood, while José “Zé” Pequeno is an ambitious drug dealer diving into a dangerous life of crime.
The cruel and abusive headmaster of a boarding school, Michel Delassalle, is murdered by an unlikely duo -- his meek wife and the mistress he brazenly flaunts. The women become increasingly unhinged by a series of odd occurrences after Delassalle's corpse mysteriously disappears.
Clean-cut Jeffrey Beaumont realizes his hometown is not so normal when he discovers a human ear in a field, the investigation soon catapulting him toward a disturbed nightclub singer and a drug-addicted sadist.
Thousands of birds flock into a seaside town and terrorize the residents in a series of deadly attacks.
A mute Scottish woman arrives in colonial New Zealand for an arranged marriage. Her husband refuses to move her beloved piano, giving it to neighbor George Baines, who agrees to return the piano in exchange for lessons. As desire swirls around the duo, the wilderness consumes the European enclave.
At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.
Luise, called Pünktchen, and Anton are closest of friends. Being the daughter of a wealthy surgeon, young Pünktchen lives in a great house. Her mother, who always travels through the world more for public relation reasons than for the social tasks she pretends to fulfill, is never available to her as a mother. Anton, son of a single and sick mother in financial trouble, does his best to help her out of it by working late. Pünktchen decides to help her only friend (as nobody else would anyway) and starts singing in public places. Trouble arises when Anton can't resist stealing a golden lighter and Pünktchen's secret life is discovered by her parents. Two troubled families finally can see the need for actions to be taken.
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.
The young wife of an upper-class academic disappears while her husband is on holiday. In his search for her, the husband learns that there was much he did not know both about her past and about their relationship.
Telmo is a retired theater director that realizes he doesn't remember the time he spent kept in jail during the military dictatorship in Brazil. He decides to stage a play and, with threads of memory, he improvises the lines with his young cast. Telmo dives into his own history and ends up revealing for himself what, being so painful, he'd rather forget.
Anaïs is twelve and bears the weight of the world on her shoulders. She watches her older sister, Elena, whom she both loves and hates. Elena is fifteen and devilishly beautiful. Neither more futile, nor more stupid than her younger sister, she cannot understand that she is merely an object of desire. And, as such, she can only be taken. Or had. Indeed, this is the subject: a girl's loss of virginity. And, that summer, it opens a door to tragedy.
A young Oklahoma artist, struggling with a recent death, finds escape in a reckless affair with her brother's girlfriend.
Elisabeth and John John are raised in the same city, yet they live light years apart, separated economically, socially and culturally. That is until the day they start in the same high school class.
When 12-year-old Quinton meets his father, Silk, he feels he's finally found a place to call home. But when the curtain is pulled back on Silk's criminal enterprise, Quinton must reconcile his place in his father's violent underworld.
The film tells the story of a steel worker named Karger who is living in the Saxon town of Riesa. Personal as well as professional changes force him to turn his back on his home town that he had never left in his whole life and to enter unknown territory. On his way into the unknown, Karger has to bid many painful farewells. However, he faces them in his characteristic indifferent manner.
A segregated Christian cult and the world of internet fame collide when Abigail Aberdeen is told to make videos for God’s eyes only.
A 29-year-old woman is alienated by friends and family for her lack of ambition. While struggling beneath the judgment of her peers, she finds a dangerous acceptance in a bright 18-year-old boy who mistakes her for a fellow student.
A young college grad, Naomi turns down law school to pursue poetry, despite her father’s objections. She subsequently struggles to survive in 1993 Denver, after being cut off by her father during a period of violent crime in the city known as the Summer of Violence.