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.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
Set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 1950s, this is the story of Éliane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, set against the backdrop of the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement.
A New York gangster and his girlfriend attempt to turn street beggar Apple Annie into a society lady when the peddler learns her daughter is marrying royalty.
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.
A prohibition-themed gangster thriller, set in the 1930s in the United States. Following a failed heist, Sam's gang takes refuge in a small isolated town where another gang has already settled, together with a mysterious priest. The two bands decide to unite, but the wife of one of the gang bosses is attracted to a member of the other gang. They plan to escape and start a new life together. But who will survive the police assault on the town?
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
A rule-bound head butler's world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in post-WWI Britain. The possibility of romance and his master's cultivation of ties with the Nazi cause challenge his carefully maintained veneer of servitude.
Spain, 1939. In the last days of the Spanish Civil War, the young Carlos arrives at the Santa Lucía orphanage, where he will make friends and enemies as he follows the quiet footsteps of a mysterious presence eager for revenge.
A group of Boston-bred gangsters set up shop in balmy Florida during the Prohibition era, facing off against the competition and the Ku Klux Klan.
A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
In 1933 New York, an overly ambitious movie producer coerces his cast and hired ship crew to travel to mysterious Skull Island, where they encounter Kong, a giant ape who is immediately smitten with the leading lady.
In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
New York in the 1920s. Max Perkins, a literary editor is the first to sign such subsequent literary greats as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. When a sprawling, chaotic 1,000-page manuscript by an unknown writer falls into his hands, Perkins is convinced he has discovered a literary genius.
Based on an autobiographical novella by Ivan Olbracht, the film tells the story of Hanele Safarová, who grows up just after the First World War in a little Ruthenian schtetl which, in true Hassidic fashion, awaits the arrival of the Messiah. But Hanele decides to follow the Zionists instead. She moves to the city to prepare for her departure to the Promised Land, where she meets a successful businessman named Ivo Karadzic, who has renounced Judaism to become a free-thinker. Their love for each other doesn’t only drive Hanele’s parents to distraction, it also threatens to destroy the entire community in the schetl.
A woman, married off to an abusive butcher, is overpowered by the twin forces of patriarchy and tradition in Taiwan during circa 1920 to 1945.
Young revolutionary Kartar Singh Sarabha fights for Indian Independence in the early 1900s.
Haunted by his mysterious past, a devoted high school football coach leads a scrawny team of orphans to the state championship during the Great Depression and inspires a broken nation along the way.
The triumphant underdog story of the University of Washington men's rowing team, who stunned the world by competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.