In 1930s Italy, a carefree Jewish waiter named Guido starts a fairy tale life by courting and marrying a lovely woman from a nearby city. Guido and his wife have a son and live happily together until the occupation of Italy by German forces. In an attempt to hold his family together and help his son survive the horrors of a Jewish Concentration Camp, Guido imagines that the Holocaust is a game and that the grand prize for winning is a tank.

After his death sometime in his 43rd year, suburbanite Lester Burnham tells of the last few weeks of his life, during which he had no idea of his imminent passing. He is a husband to real estate agent Carolyn Burnham and father to high school student Jane Burnham. Although Lester and Carolyn once loved each other, they now merely tolerate each other. Typical wallflower Jane also hates both her parents; the three suffer individually in silence in their home life. Jane tries to steer clear of both her parents. Carolyn, relatively new to the real estate business, wants to create the persona of success to further her career, aspiring to the professional life of Buddy Kane, the king of the real estate business in their neighborhood. Lester merely walks mindlessly through life, including at his job in advertising. His company is downsizing, and he, like all the other employees, has to justify his position to the newly hired efficiency expert to keep his job. Things change for Lester when he falls in love at first sight with Jane's more experienced classmate, Angela Hayes. Both Janie and Angela can see Lester's sexual infatuation with Angela, who courts such attention from any man as a sign that she is model material, she having once appeared in Seventeen and is a career to which she aspires. Lester's infatuation with Angela gives him a reenergized view on life, where he openly doesn't care anymore what anyone thinks about what he does, anyone except Angela. This infatuation coincides with the Fittses moving in next door: homophobic disciplinarian US Marine Colonel Frank Fitts who rules the house with a military fist (that fist being both figurative and literal), his semi-comatose wife Barbara Fitts, and their bright and quietly subversive 18-year-old son Ricky Fitts, who openly abides by his father's rules while behind the scenes lives by his own quite different perspective. Much like Lester's infatuation, Ricky immediately becomes infatuated with Jane; he considers girls like Angela as ordinary. The entry of Angela and the Fittses into the Burnhams' lives ultimately leads to each of the players confronting what is truly in his or her heart.

In 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family of a long dream being fulfilled of the hated Shah's defeat in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However as Marji grows up, she witnesses first hand how the new Iran, now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, has become a repressive tyranny on its own. With Marji dangerously refusing to remain silent at this injustice, her parents send her abroad to Vienna to study for a better life. However, this change proves an equally difficult trial with the young woman finding herself in a different culture loaded with abrasive characters and profound disappointments that deeply trouble her. Even when she returns home, Marji finds that both she and homeland have changed too much and the young woman and her loving family must decide where she truly belongs.

2007 animated film by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Drama set in a repressed, deeply religious community in the north of Scotland, where a naive young woman named Bess McNeil meets and falls in love with Danish oil-rig worker Jan. Bess and Jan are deeply in love but, when Jan returns to his rig, Bess prays to God that he returns for good. Jan does return, his neck broken in an accident aboard the rig. Because of his condition, Jan and Bess are now unable to enjoy a sexual relationship and Jan urges Bess to take another lover and tell him the details. As Bess becomes more and more deviant in her sexual behavior, the more she comes to believe that her actions are guided by God and are helping Jan recover.

Centered on a post-apocalyptic society where food is scarce and used as currency. In an apartment building with a delicatessen on the ground floor. The owner of the eatery also owns the apartment building and is in need of a new maintenance man since the prior one "mysteriously" disappeared. A former clown applies for the job and the butcher's intent is to have him work for as little as possible. The clown and butcher's daughter fall in love and she tries to foil her father's plans by contacting the "troglodytes", a grain eating sub-group of society who live entirely underground.

1991 film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro

Two seemingly well-educated young men, who call each other Paul and Peter among other names, approach a family on vacation. They are, apparently, friends of the neighbors, and, at the beginning, their true intentions are not known, but soon, the family is imprisoned and tortured in its own house violently, which the viewers are forced mostly to imagine and to share a certain complicity with the criminals. It might be some kind of game with the lives of husband, wife, son, and dog, but why are they doing it?

Danzig in the 1920s-1930s. Oskar Matzerath, son of a local dealer, is a most unusual boy. Equipped with full intellect right from birth, he decides on his third birthday not to grow up as he sees the crazy world around him on the eve of World War II. He refuses to join society and his tin drum symbolizes his protest against the middle-class mentality of his family and neighbourhood, which stand for all passive people in Nazi Germany at the time. But (almost) nobody listens to him, so the catastrophe continues.

1979 film directed by Volker Schlöndorff

Anders is a recovering drug addict in an Oslo rehab clinic. On 30 August, he is given a day's leave to attend a job interview in the city center. After visiting his friend Thomas, he proceeds to his appointment. In the interview, he admits to being a drug addict and storms out. He then wanders the streets of Oslo for the rest of the day and night, meeting, and sometimes confronting, people from his past. The film ends the next day, 31 August. Focusing on the decisions Anders has made with his time off.

Middle-aged American movie star Bob Harris is in Tokyo to film a personal endorsement Suntory whiskey ad solely for the Japanese market. He is past his movie star prime, but his name and image still have enough cachet for him to have gotten this lucrative $2 million job. He has an unsatisfying home life where his wife Lydia follows him wherever he goes - in the form of messages and faxes - for him to deal with the minutiae of their everyday lives, while she stays at home to look after their kids. Staying at the same upscale hotel is fellow American, twenty-something recent Yale Philosophy graduate Charlotte, her husband John, an entertainment still photographer, who is on assignment in Japan. As such, she is largely left to her own devices in the city, especially when his job takes him out of Tokyo. Both Bob and Charlotte are feeling lost by their current situations, which are not helped by the cultural barriers they feel in Tokyo, those cultural barriers extending far beyond just not knowing the language. After a few chance encounters in the hotel, they end up spending much of their time hanging out together, each helping the other deal with their feelings of loss in their current lives. The friendship that develops between the two, which is not always a bumpy-free one, may be just for this specific place and time, but it may also have long lasting implications.

2003 American-Japanese comedy-drama film by Sofia Coppola

A girl of perhaps five or six is orphaned in an air raid while fleeing a French city with her parents early in World War II. She is befriended by a pre-adolescent peasant boy after she wandered away from the other refugees, and is taken in for a few weeks by his family. The children become fast friends, and the film follows their attempt to assimilate the deaths they both face, and the religious rituals surrounding those deaths, through the construction of a cemetery for all sorts of animals. Child-like and adult activity are frequently at cross-purposes, however.

Tokyo's nasty underside, seen primarily through the eyes of Oscar, a heavy drug user, whose sister Linda is a stripper. Oscar also has flashbacks to his childhood when trauma upends the siblings. Oscar's drug-fed hallucinations alter Tokyo's already-disconcerting nights, and after the police shoot him, he can float above and look down: on his sister's sorrow, on the rooms of a love hotel, and on life at even a molecular level. The spectrum's colors can be beautiful; it's people's colorless lives that can be ugly. And what of afterlife, is there more than a void?

Still haunted by that fateful wartime incident and the nearly catastrophic events of

A World War II satire that follows a lonely German boy named Jojo (

Blondie, The Good (Clint Eastwood), is a professional gunslinger who is out trying to earn a few dollars. Angel Eyes, The Bad (Lee Van Cleef), is a hitman who always commits to a task and sees it through--as long as he's paid to do so. And Tuco, The Ugly (Eli Wallach), is a wanted outlaw trying to take care of his own hide. Tuco and Blondie share a partnership making money off of Tuco's bounty, but when Blondie unties the partnership, Tuco tries to hunt down Blondie. When Blondie and Tuco come across a horse carriage loaded with dead bodies, they soon learn from the only survivor, Bill Carson (Antonio Casale), that he and a few other men have buried a stash of gold in a cemetery. Unfortunately, Carson dies and Tuco only finds out the name of the cemetery, while Blondie finds out the name on the grave. Now the two must keep each other alive in order to find the gold. Angel Eyes (who had been looking for Bill Carson) discovers that Tuco and Blondie met with Carson and knows they know where the gold is; now he needs them to lead him to it. Now The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly must all battle it out to get their hands on $200,000.00 worth of gold.

Every day Nawara goes to work along a path that takes her between the alleys of the poor neighborhood and the roads that lead to the villas within a luxury compound. Every day, on her way to work, she carries the worries of the people in her neighborhood and their simple dreams. Little does she know that the spring of 2011 will bring her something unexpected.

On the outskirts of Budapest, the ageing recluse and saturnine manager of a small abattoir, Endre, is used to hiding his disabled left arm along with his emotions behind a busy schedule. Then, unexpectedly, a shy and graceful newcomer in the office catches Endre's eye: Mária, the plant's cryptic and glacially beautiful quality-control inspector. Now, against the backdrop of the cold slaughterhouse and a small theft within the company's walls, an eerie and almost spiritual bond will start to develop between the tender outcasts, as, more and more, their lives become inextricably intertwined. However, are the two dreamers, Endre and Mária, ready to embrace the catharsis of love on both body and soul?

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