It's the last day of school at a high school in a small town in Texas in 1976. The upperclassmen are hazing the incoming freshmen, and everyone is trying to get stoned, drunk, or laid, even the football players that signed a pledge not to.

William Parrish (Sir Anthony Hopkins), media tycoon, loving father, and still a human being, is about to celebrate his 65th birthday. One morning, he is contacted by the inevitable, by hallucination, as he thinks. Later, Death enters his home and his life, personified in a man's body: Joe Black (Brad Pitt) has arrived. His intention was to take William with him, but accidentally, Joe's former host and William's beautiful daughter Susan (Claire Forlani) have already met. Joe begins to develop certain interest in life on Earth, as well as in Susan, who has no clue with whom she's flirting.

After a whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo with handsome widower Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer), a newly married young woman (Lily James) arrives at Manderley, her new husband's imposing family estate on a windswept English coast. Naive and inexperienced, she begins to settle into the trappings of her new life, but finds herself battling the shadow of Maxim's first wife, the elegant and urbane Rebecca, whose haunting legacy is kept alive by Manderley's sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas).

A correspondence begins between Juliet Ashton (Lily James) and members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, with them sharing their experiences of Nazi-occupied Guernsey Island. When an idea for a book catches Juliet, she goes to visit the island, making life-long friends and taking life changing steps along the way. This book is told by way of letters, and as the reader, you become enchanted by the writers of them and the love Juliet comes to feel for each of the Islanders; Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), Amelia Maugery (Dame Penelope Wilton), Isola Pribby (Katherine Parkinson), Eben Ramsey (Sir Tom Courtenay), Kit (Florence Keen), and Elizabeth McKenna (Jessica Brown Findlay).

Flor Moreno, an impecunious single mother of one, emigrates to Los Angeles from Mexico in high hopes of creating a better life for her twelve-year-old daughter, Cristina. However, after landing a job as a housekeeper for the laid-back gourmet chef, John Clasky, and his well-to-do family, Flor will find herself up against a daunting language barrier, and Deborah, John's troubled wife. Little by little, as Flor struggles to start afresh, and of course, learn English, an inevitable cultural collision is at hand; moreover, a burgeoning romantic affection starts to take over. Will John and Flor ever bridge the linguistic divide?

In New York City, Molly Gunn is a spoiled, wealthy, immature young woman who lives as if she were a fairytale princess. Her father, a popular rock guitarist, died in a plane crash with her mother when she was little. In a nightclub on her birthday she meets Lorraine "Ray" Schleine, a nasty young girl with an adult attitude, who lives with her careless mother and a terminally-ill father in a fancy uptown apartment. When Molly's accountant vanishes with her US$ 100,000,000.00 inheritance, she is left with nothing but debts and must work to survive--with no previous experience or marketable skills. She is hired to be Ray's babysitter, and their close contact makes Molly reach maturity and Ray act like the 8-year-old she is.

A beautician in America is mistakenly thought to be an academic teacher by a representative of an Eastern European dictator. She is invited to their country on that mistaken belief and is asked to be the tutor of the dictator's children. While there, she tries to Westernize the whole country.

New York based jazz pianist Willie Conway heads back to his small hometown of Knights Ridge, Massachusetts for a high school reunion. The trip is as much to go to the reunion and see his old friends - none of whom left Knights Ridge after graduation - as it is to get away from his current life, at which he is at a crossroads both personally and professionally. He is just eking out a living with his piano playing gigs, and as such he is thinking about taking a sales job. He's also not sure if he's ready to marry his long time girlfriend, lawyer Tracy Stover. Most of Willie's Knights Ridge blue collar friends' best days were in high school, they still having that "trophy" mentality of girlfriends and wives. Only Michael "Mo" Morris is happily married with a family. Paul Kirkwood, whose room is plastered with magazine pictures of models, wants his waitress ex-girlfriend Jan back only because he knows now that he can't have her. And Tommy "Birdman" Rowland, who was the big man in high school, is trying to end his affair with his now married high school girlfriend, Darian Smalls. Despite knowing about Darian, Tommy's current girlfriend, Sharon Cassidy, stands by her man through bad and worse. A cousin of their bar owning friend Stanley "Stinky" Womack, the beautiful Andera who is visiting from Chicago, may provide the voice of reason for this group of friends in dealing with their women problems. Some reason is what Willie may need in trying to figure out why he is attracted to Marty, his father's thirteen year old neighbor, especially as Willie learns that Tracy has decided to join him for the reunion.

In Texas in the fall of 1980, college freshman Jake Bradford, a hotshot pitcher in high school, moves into an off-campus house with other members of the college baseball team. He meets several teammates, including his roommate Billy, who has been nicknamed "Beuter" because of his Deep Southern accent. He joins Finnegan, Roper, Dale, and Plummer cruising the campus by car, looking for women..

In the 1960s with the Cold War in play, CIA agent Napoleon Solo successfully helps Gaby Teller defect to West Germany despite the intimidating opposition of KGB agent Illya Kuryakin. Later, all three unexpectedly find themselves working together in a joint mission to stop a private criminal organization from using Gaby's father's scientific expertise to construct their own nuclear bomb. Through clenched teeth and stylish poise, all three must find a way to cooperate for the sake of world peace, even as they each pursue their own agendas.

In 1931, in Franklin County, Virginia, Forrest Bondurant is a legend as immortal after surviving the war. Together with his brothers Howard and the coward Jack, the Bondurant family has a distillery and bootlegging business. When the corrupt District Attorney Mason Wardell arrives in Franklin with the unscrupulous Special Deputy Charles Rakes, the Bondurant family refuses to pay the required bribe to the authorities. Rakes pursues the brothers and unsuccessfully tries to find their distillery. Meanwhile Forrest hires the waitress Maggie, a woman with a hidden past in Chicago, and they fall in love with each other. Jack courts the preacher's daughter Bertha Minnix and deals a great load of alcoholic liquor with the powerful gangster Floyd Banner. Jack shows off in Franklin attracting the attention of Rakes that finds the location of their distillery. When he kills the crippled Cricket Pete, the locals join forces to face the corrupt authorities.

In 1985, against the backdrop of Thatcherism, Brian Jackson enrolls in the University of Bristol, a scholarship boy from seaside Essex with a love of knowledge for its own sake and a childhood spent watching "University Challenge," a college quiz show. At Bristol he tries out for the Challenge team and falls under the spell of Alice, a lovely blond with an extensive sexual past. He's smitten, and he carelessly manages to hurt the feelings of Rebecca Epstein, a friend whose politics and wit he admires. The Challenge finale is coming up; maybe Brian can redeem himself and still avoid being a prat.

In the millenium version of this classic Gothic horror we find Abraham Van Helsing (Plummer), who has tangled with Count Dracula (Butler) in the past, working as an English antiques dealer. Simon (Miller) is a vampire hunter in training under his apprenticeship. Van Helsing and Simon travel from London to New Orleans to rescue Van Helsing's daughter Mary (Waddell) from the family's life long nemesis - Dracula.

Frances Mayes is a San Francisco-based literature professor, literary reviewer and author, who is struggling in writing her latest book. Her outwardly perfect and stable life takes an unexpected turn when her husband files for divorce. He wants to marry the woman with whom he is having an affair. Frances supported her husband financially as he was writing his own book, and he sues her for alimony despite her financial difficulties. And he wants to keep the house. Frances eventually accepts her best friend Patti's offer of a vacation, a gay tour of Tuscany which Patti and her lesbian partner Grace originally purchased for themselves before Patti found out that she is pregnant. The gift is a means to escape dealing with the divorce, from which Patti feels Frances may never recover emotionally without some intervention. Feeling that Patti's assessment may be correct in that she has too much emotional baggage ever to return to San Francisco, Frances, while in Tuscany, impulsively ditches the tour to purchase an aged villa, which ends up being a fixer-upper. Frances has many obstacles in eking out a productive and happy life in her new surroundings, that happy life which she hopes will eventually include rediscovering romantic love. In a discussion with sympathetic real estate agent Signor Martini, Frances outlines what emotionally she wants to accomplish with the villa, despite none of those items in a substantive material sense currently being in her life. In response, Martini tells her the story of a set of railroad tracks that were laid between Vienna and Venice before an engine that could make the trek being built, a train which now regularly travels the route. The question becomes whether Frances, in going through the process, will be laying another Vienna to Venice track, and if so whether that end product emotionally will be exactly as she envisions.

NECESSITIES

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ATTENTION

EMOTIONAL

EVERY

CHILDHOOD

TRY

DIFFERENT