In futuristic London, Alex DeLarge is the leader of his "droogs", Georgie, Dim and Pete. One night, after getting intoxicated on "drencrom" (milk laced with drugs), they engage in an evening of "ultra-violence," which includes beating an elderly vagrant and fighting a rival gang led by Billyboy. After stealing a car, they drive to the country home of writer F. Alexander, where they beat Mr. Alexander to the point of crippling him for life. Alex then rapes his wife while singing "Singin' in the Rain".
Set in 1953, the film explores the budding relationship between Billy Joe McAllister (Benson) and Bobbie Lee Hartley (O'Connor) (who corresponds to the unnamed narrator of the original song), despite resistance from Hartley's family, who contend she is too young to date. One night at a jamboree, McAllister gets drunk and seems nauseated and confused when entering a makeshift whorehouse behind the gathering.
In October 1986, a young woman is found raped and murdered in a ditch near a field. Soon after, another woman is found raped and murdered in a field. Local detective Park Doo-man, not having dealt with such a serious case before, is overwhelmed; key evidence is improperly collected, the police's investigative methods are suspect, and their forensic technology is near non-existent. Detective Seo Tae-yoon is sent from Seoul to assist them; their methods clash and he is unable to convince them they are dealing with a serial killer until his predictions of another murder come true. He realizes that the killer waits until a rainy night, and only kills women wearing red. A female police officer realizes that a local radio station is always requested to play a particular song during the nights the murders are committed.
Taking place over the course of a single day, November 30, 1962, a month after the Cuban missile crisis, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer (Colin Firth), a middle-aged English college professor living in Los Angeles. George dreams that he encounters the body of his longtime partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), at the scene of the car accident that took Jim's life eight months earlier. After awakening, George delivers a voiceover discussing the pain and depression he has endured since Jim's death and his intention to commit suicide that evening.
A father (Viggo Mortensen), devoted to teaching his six children how to live and survive in the deep forests of the Pacific Northwest, is forced to leave his self-created paradise. When confronted with the real world, he begins a journey that challenges his ideas of freedom and what it means to raise a family.
Breaking the Waves tells the story of Bess McNeill, a pretty young Scottish woman with a history of psychological problems. She marries atheist oil rig worker Jan, despite disapproval from her community and her Free Scottish Presbyterian Calvinist church. Bess is steadfast and pure of heart, but extremely simple and childlike in her beliefs. During her frequent visits to the church, she prays to God and carries on conversations with Him using her own voice, believing that He is responding directly through her.
The story may not be linear and exhibits several instances of temporal disruption. A dark-haired woman (Harring) escapes her own murder, surviving a car accident on Mulholland Drive. Injured and in shock, she descends into Los Angeles and sneaks into an apartment which an older, red-headed woman has just vacated. An aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Watts) arrives at the same apartment and finds the dark-haired woman confused, not knowing her own name. The dark-haired woman assumes the name "Rita" after seeing a poster for the film Gilda (1946), starring Rita Hayworth. To help Rita remember her identity, Betty looks in Rita's purse, where she finds a large amount of money and an unusual blue key.
Following a family dispute, Janet moves out of the home she shares with her older sister, Lara and their single mother, Maddie. She moves into apartment 1303 on the thirteenth floor of a downtown Detroit apartment building. A nine-year-old neighbor, Emily, explains to Janet that a previous occupant of her new apartment killed herself. Strange things begin to occur in the apartment and when Janet appears bruised at work, she rebuffs concerns that her boyfriend, Mark, is abusing her and blames the marks on sleepwalking.
Barbara Lang paints a barrier around her living room to protect her telekinetic daughter, Rachel, from the devil. Barbara is soon institutionalized for schizophrenia.
In 1988, businessman Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is arrested for drunken behavior, missing his daughter's 4th birthday. After his friend, Joo-hwan (Ji Dae-han), picks him up from the police station, they go to a phone booth to call home to let Dae-su's family know of his whereabouts. While Joo-hwan is talking to Dae-su's wife on the phone, Dae-su is kidnapped. He wakes up in a solitary confinement in a hotel-like prison. Confined with no human contact or explanation for his kidnapping and frequently gassed with a possibly mind altering drug, Dae-su soon learns through news reports his wife has been murdered, and he is the prime suspect. Dae-su passes the time shadowboxing, planning revenge, and secretly attempting to tunnel out of his cell.
Justine Last (Jennifer Aniston) is a depressed and unmotivated thirty-year-old woman living in a small town in Texas with her husband Phil (John C. Reilly), a house painter who spends most of his free time smoking marijuana with his best friend, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). Justine works at Retail Rodeo, the local big-box store, along with Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel), a cynical, plain-spoken teenager, Gwen (Deborah Rush), a ditzy older woman who manages the cosmetics counter, and Corny (Mike White), a highly religious security guard.
The film begins with an introductory sequence involving the main characters and images from space and introducing many of the film's visual leitmotifs. These are motifs of virtually still images revealing the key elements of the film: Justine the bride in deep melancholy with birds falling behind her; of a lawn with trees and sundial with two different shadows; Pieter Breughel's Hunters in the Snow (often used as interpretation of an idealised nostalgia) burning; the non existent 19th hole (limbo) and the Black Horse collapsing catastrophically in slow motion (Id, ego and super-ego battle); Justine as a bride being swept along by a river; and her being held back by her wedding dress; and finally Justine and her nephew building their magic cave before the Earth crashes into Melancholia becoming one.
Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke) is an obese, upper-class lawyer living with his wife Heidi (Lucinda Jenney) and their daughter Linda (Bethany Joy Lenz). Billy recently defended an underworld crime boss named Richie "The Hammer" Ginelli (Joe Mantegna) in court. The town Billy lives in is currently hosting a carnival, which is run by gypsies whom the town seems to have prejudices against.
In the 1960s Polish People's Republic, Anna, a young novice nun, is told by her prioress that before she takes her vows she must visit her aunt, Wanda Gruz, who is her only surviving relative. Anna travels to visit her aunt Wanda, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous judge who reveals that Anna's actual name is Ida Lebenstein. Ida's parents had been Jews who were murdered late in the German occupation of Poland during World War II (1939–45). Ida was then an infant, and as an orphan she'd been raised by the convent. Wanda, who'd been a Communist resistance fighter against the German occupation, had become the state prosecutor "Red Wanda" who sent "men to their deaths". Wanda's role alludes to "the political show trials of the early 1950s, when Poland’s Communist government used judicial terror (among other methods) to consolidate its power and eliminate its enemies.
Josh (Tom Everett Scott) gets in to college on a scholarship, and Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) is assigned as his roommate. Cooper does little work and instead spends all the time partying and consistently fails his course, but his father continues to fund him through college. The normally studious Josh is led astray by Cooper's lifestyle and spends the first half of his first semester partying instead of studying, and consequently flunks all of his mid-terms. To his horror he then finds out that a condition of his scholarship is a passing grade average each semester, and that with his poor mid-term score he needs an A+++ (which is impossible) in all of his courses or he will lose his scholarship.