A spell of time in the life of a family in rural Tochigi prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.
Self
On a cold Monday morning, a group of counselors clock in at an old-fashioned social services office. Their task is to interview the recently deceased, record their personal details, then, over the course of the week, assist them in choosing a single memory to keep for eternity.
Five bizarre stories with no apparent connection to one another eventually become intertwined, resulting in surreal circumstances.
A young student decides to have no more interaction with the world than is needed to minimally sustain life. His increasingly automaton-like behavior is coupled with a strange clarity of insight about the world around him.
An outrageous collection of surreal, short attention span non-sequiturs largely revolving around Guitar Brother, his randy older sibling, and the pair's portly Caucasian brother.
Chiku is a devastated and dangerous town with 5 gangs fighting fiercely. Mugen and the Amamiya Brothers clashed, leading to Mugen disbanding.
Alone in a small white house on the edge of national road 1, the Trans-Saharan road, which connects Algiers to Tamanrasset crossing the immensity of the desert, Malika, 74, one day opened her door to the director Hassen Ferhani, who came there to scout with his friend Chawki Amari, journalist at El Watan and author of the story Nationale 1 which relates his journey on this north-south axis of more than 2000 km. The Malika of Amari's novel, which Ferhani admits to having first perceived as a "literary fantasy", suddenly takes on an unsuspected human depth in this environment naturally hostile to man. She lends herself to the film project as she welcomes her clients, with an economy of gestures and words, an impression reinforced by the mystery that surrounds her and the rare elements of her biography which suggest that she is not from the region, that she left the fertile north of Algeria to settle in the desert where she lives with a dog and a cat.
A man ran into a woman on a street. She was not attractive, but was a perfect girl for him. After missing the chance to talk to her, he contemplates on how he should have approached her.
Akira Hojo and Chiaki Asami live different lives in Tokyo, Japan: Hojo is the leader of a small but rising Yakuza clan, while Asami is a politician aiming to become the youngest member of the Japanese parliament. But while they both live in different ways, Hojo and Asami share the same past; both of them were survivors of the Killing Fields of Cambodia. With the aggression and survival instincts they learned in the Cambodian jungles, Hojo and Asami strive in both the Yakuza and political world to reform Japan into their own sanctuary.
A failed actor switches identities with a stranger at a bath house thinking it is his way out of his life of misery but only to find himself filling the shoes of an elite assassin.
Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother-in-law is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.
Cheng is a young Chinese mainlander who moves in with his expatriate cousins to work at an ice factory in Thailand. He does this with a family promise never to get involved in any fights. However, when members of his family begin disappearing after meeting the management of the factory, the resulting mystery and pressures force him to break that vow and take on the villainy of the Big Boss.
In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.
When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters—an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire—to rescue him.
A group of people gather in the California desert to watch a "film" set in the late 1990s featuring a sentient, homicidal car tire named Robert. The assembled crowd of onlookers watch as Robert becomes obsessed with a beautiful and mysterious woman and goes on a rampage through a desert town.
As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life. Proud but pragmatic Prince Don Fabrizio Salina allows his war hero nephew, Tancredi, to marry Angelica, the beautiful daughter of gauche, bourgeois Don Calogero, in order to maintain the family's accustomed level of comfort and political clout.
Former pool hustler "Fast Eddie" Felson decides he wants to return to the game by taking a pupil. He meets talented but green Vincent Lauria and proposes a partnership. As they tour pool halls, Eddie teaches Vincent the tricks of scamming, but he eventually grows frustrated with Vincent's showboat antics, leading to an argument and a falling-out. Eddie takes up playing again and soon crosses paths with Vincent as an opponent.
Real zombies arrive and terrorize the crew of a zombie film being shot in an abandoned warehouse, said to be the site of military experiments on humans.
In 1979 Santa Barbara, California, Dorothea Fields is a determined single mother in her mid-50s who is raising her adolescent son, Jamie, at a moment brimming with cultural change and rebellion. Dorothea enlists the help of two younger women – Abbie, a free-spirited punk artist living as a boarder in the Fields' home and Julie, a savvy and provocative teenage neighbour – to help with Jamie's upbringing.
Just out of jail, rumpled English archaeologist Arthur reconnects with his wayward crew of tombaroli accomplices – a happy-go-lucky collective of itinerant grave-robbers who survive by looting Etruscan tombs and fencing the ancient treasures they dig up.
Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for some moments from his death-like sleep.
Throughout his life Edward Bloom has always been a man of big appetites, enormous passions and tall tales. In his later years, he remains a huge mystery to his son, William. Now, to get to know the real man, Will begins piecing together a true picture of his father from flashbacks of his amazing adventures.
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.
Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.
Held in an L.A. interrogation room, Verbal Kint attempts to convince the feds that a mythic crime lord, Keyser Soze, not only exists, but was also responsible for drawing him and his four partners into a multi-million dollar heist that ended with an explosion in San Pedro harbor – leaving few survivors. Verbal lures his interrogators with an incredible story of the crime lord's almost supernatural prowess.
A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.
Renowned oceanographer Steve Zissou has sworn vengeance upon the rare shark that devoured a member of his crew. In addition to his regular team, he is joined on his boat by Ned, a man who believes Zissou to be his father, and Jane, a journalist pregnant by a married man. They travel the sea, all too often running into pirates and, perhaps more traumatically, various figures from Zissou's past, including his estranged wife, Eleanor.
A supernatural tale set on death row in a Southern prison, where gentle giant John Coffey possesses the mysterious power to heal people's ailments. When the cell block's head guard, Paul Edgecomb, recognizes Coffey's miraculous gift, he tries desperately to help stave off the condemned man's execution.
Nora is a young housewife and mother, living in a quaint little village with her husband and their two sons. The Swiss countryside is untouched by the major social upheavals the movement of 1968 has brought about. Nora’s life is not affected either; she is a quiet person who is liked by everybody – until she starts to publicly fight for women’s suffrage, which the men are due to vote on in a ballot on February 7, 1971.
A man entranced by his dreams and imagination is lovestruck with a French woman and feels he can show her his world.
A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.
This military service comedy chronicles the misadventures of the U.S.S. Bustard in Japan. The crew has stolen a Buddha statue from a Japanese village, which if discovered missing, would threaten Japanese/American relations. Doc Willoughby is the ship's petty officer, whose antics are constantly getting him into trouble with his captain. On shore leave, Willoughby falls for a seemingly demure Japanese girl in a kimono shop, who actually turns out to be a Japanese/American nurse in the US Navy, Lt. Tomiko Momoyama. However, it turns out she was betrothed as a child to a traditional Japanese man named Toshi, who fully intends on enforcing tradition. Willoughby divides his time between trying to return the Buddha statue back to the Japanese village it rightfully belongs to, and trying to woo Tomiko from the traditional Japanese man she rightfully belongs to.
Centaur lives a modest life with his family in rural Kyrgyzstan until he abruptly becomes the center of attention when he is caught stealing a racehorse at night. A story inspired by the myth when horses became the wings of men.
On August 12, 2015, Hasegawa proposed to Ichiko. Ichiko is moved by Hasegawa's proposal and sheds tears, but the next day, she suddenly leaves home, seemingly shocked after seeing the TV news. Where did Ichiko go? Hasegawa reports the disappearance to the police, and the detective in charge of the investigation tells an unexpected story.
"Highway Hypnosis" - alternatively referred to as "white line fever" - is a dazed state in which a driver may travel long stretches of open road in a compliant and normal fashion, yet with little-to-no recollection of how their destination was reached.
Rei helps the woman she's been in love with for years escape her abusive husband. While on the run, their feelings for each other catch fire.
A story of three escort girls living in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. They work at the same escort service while feeling lonely in their urban lives.
Okoma, a witty young woman working as a conductor in an old, rickety bus in Kōfu, Yamanashi (rural Japan), has a creative idea that could avert the dwindling number of passengers when her job and the bus company itself are at stake.
Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.
Hickspoiltation film from the early 1970s ostensibly starring Oscar nominee Mercedes McCambridge, but really more a film looking for an excuse to show off Simone Griffeth's beauty. She plays a daughter of a swamp family. The whole family goes to a carnival where she is seduced by an older male performer, while her teen brother is seduced by an older female performer.
Air Force Major Lloyd Gruver is reassigned to a Japanese air base and is confronted with US racial prejudice against the Japanese people. The issue is compounded because a number of the soldiers become romantically involved with Japanese women, in defiance of US military policy. Ordinarily, a by-the-book officer, Gruver must take a position when a buddy of his, an enlisted man, Joe Kelly, falls in love with a Japanese woman, Katsumi, and marries her. Gruver risks his position by serving as best man at the wedding ceremony.