Le film retrace la Révolution roumaine de 1989 à l'aide d'images d'archives depuis le 21 décembre 1989, le dernier discours de Ceausescu, au 26 décembre 1989, le premier reportage télévisé de son procès.
As Francis (Friedrich Feher) sits on a bench with an older man who complains that spirits have driven him away from his family and home, a dazed woman named Jane (Lil Dagover) passes them. Francis explains she is his "fiancée" and that they have suffered a great ordeal. Most of the rest of the film is a flashback of Francis' story, which takes place in Holstenwall, a shadowy village of twisted buildings and spiraling streets. Francis and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), who are good-naturedly competing for Jane's affections, plan to visit the town fair. Meanwhile, a mysterious man named Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) seeks a permit from the rude town clerk to present a spectacle at the fair, which features a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt). The clerk mocks and berates Dr. Caligari, but ultimately approves the permit. That night, the clerk is found stabbed to death in his bed.
Ali (Salem), is a Moroccan Gastarbeiter (guest worker) in his late thirties, and Emmi (Mira), is a 60-year-old widowed cleaning woman. They meet when Emmi ducks inside a bar, driven by the rain and drawn by the exotic Arabic music (Al Asfouryeh by Sabah) she says she has heard so often on her walk home from work. A woman in the bar (Katharina Herberg) who is part of Ali's Arabic-speaking cohort tauntingly suggests Ali ask Emmi ("the old woman") to dance, and Emmi accepts. A strange and unlikely friendship develops, then a romance and soon they are living together in Emmi's flat. Out of a professed sense of responsibility but also hopefulness, Emmi first confides in her newfound love when she goes to visit her daughter Krista (Irm Hermann) and her tyrannical son-in-law Eugen (Fassbinder himself) and announces that she is in love with Ali; Eugen thinks she is screwy and Krista as well can only think that her mother - who has been a widow for years - is fantasizing.
Jannings' character, the doorman for a famous hotel, is demoted to washroom (restroom) attendant, as he is considered too old and infirm to be the image of the hotel. He tries to conceal his demotion from his friends and family, but to his shame, he is discovered. His friends, thinking he has lied to them all along about his prestigious job, taunt him mercilessly while his family rejects him out of shame. The man, shocked and in incredible grief, returns to the hotel to sleep in the washroom where he works. The only person to be kind towards him is the night watchman, who covers him with his coat as he falls asleep.
The film is a meditation on catastrophe, contextualised through the literary modes of religion and science fiction. It begins with a quotation, attributed to Blaise Pascal: "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendor." This attribution is apocryphal, as the text was in fact written by Herzog for the film and chosen, like the music, to give the film a certain mood. The prologue of the quotation is followed by thirteen sections, denoted by numbered title cards: "A Capital City", "The War", "After the Battle", "Finds from Torture Chambers", "Satan's National Park", "Childhood", "And a Smoke Arose like a Smoke from a Furnace", "A Pilgrimage", "Dinosaurs on the Go", "Protuberances", "The Drying Up of the Source", "Life Without the Fire" and "I am so tired of sighing; Lord, let it be night". ^^
Brian Sweeney "Fitzcarraldo" Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski) is an Irishman living in Iquitos, a small city east of the Andes in the Amazon Basin in Peru in the early part of the 20th century, when the city grew exponentially during the rubber boom. He has an indomitable spirit, but is little more than a dreamer with one major failure already behind him – the bankrupted and incomplete Trans-Andean railways. A lover of opera and a great fan of the internationally known Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, he dreams of building an opera house in Iquitos. Numerous Europeans and North African Sephardic Jewish immigrants have settled in the city at this time, bringing their cultures with them. The opera house will require considerable amounts of money, which the booming rubber industry in Peru should yield in profits. The areas in the Amazon Basin known to contain rubber trees have been parceled up by the Peruvian government and are leased to private companies for exploitation.
In the closing days of World War II, a small German town comes into focus as American forces advance in its direction. In the town's school, seven boys—each about 16 years old—are oblivious to the seriousness and dangers of the war, feeling excitement about how close the fighting is getting to them, and they live their lives as normally as they can, though they are overshadowed with personal problems: Karl, who has a crush on his hairstylist father's young assistant, is shocked to see them in an intimate situation; Klaus is oblivious to the affections of his classmate Franziska; and Walter is deeply resentful of his father, the local Nazi Party Ortsgruppenleiter, who has chosen to save his own skin under the pretense of an important Volkssturm meeting. Jürgen is the son of a German officer who has been killed in action, and hopes to live up to his father's reputation.
The sketch presents the 90th birthday of upper-class Englishwoman Miss Sophie, who hosts a celebration dinner every year for her friends Mr Pomeroy, Mr Winterbottom, Sir Toby, and Admiral von Schneider. (The plot has nothing to do with New Year's Eve. There is a "Happy New Year" toast, but this appears to be purely a reference to Miss Sophie's birthday.) The problem is that due to Miss Sophie's considerable age, she has outlived all of her friends, and so her equally aged manservant James makes his way around the table, impersonating each of the guests in turn. Miss Sophie decides on appropriate drinks to accompany the menu: Mulligatawny soup (Miss Sophie orders dry sherry), North Sea haddock (with white wine), chicken (with champagne), and fruit for dessert (with port) served by James, who finds himself raising (and emptying) his glass four times per course. That takes its toll, increasingly noticeable in James's growing difficulty in pouring the drinks, telling wine glasses from vases of flowers, and refraining from bursting into song. Even before the alcohol begins to exert its influence, he keeps tripping up on the head of a tiger skin lying on the floor on his way from the buffet to the dinner table, although on one occasion he surprises himself by avoiding it – only to trip on it on his return to the buffet instead.
In the late 2020s the world is in turmoil, with the United States fractured as a result of prolonged conflict and a pandemic of the "St. Mary's Virus" ravaging Europe. The United Kingdom is ruled as a fascist police state by the Norsefire Party. Political opponents, immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals and other "undesirables" are imprisoned in concentration camps. On November 4, a Guy Fawkes-masked vigilante identifing himself as "V" (Hugo Weaving) rescues Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), an employee of the state-run British Television Network (BTN), from members of the "Fingermen" secret police while she is out past curfew. From a rooftop, they watch his demolition of the Old Bailey criminal court building, accompanied by fireworks and the 1812 Overture. Inspector Finch (Stephen Rea), Scotland Yard's Chief of Police, is tasked with investigating V's activities while BTN declares the incident an "emergency demolition". V interrupts the broadcast to claim responsibility and urges the people of Britain to rise up against their government. He asks them to meet him exactly one year later, on November 5, Guy Fawkes Night, outside the Houses of Parliament, which he promises to destroy. During the broadcast, the police attempt to capture V. Evey helps him escape but is knocked unconscious.
The film is set in Washington state in 1964 and focuses on Selma Ježková (Björk), a Czech immigrant who has moved to the United States with her son, Gene Ježek (Vladica Kostic). They live a life of poverty as Selma works at a factory with her good friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve), whom she nicknames "Cvalda" (which means "chubby" in Czech). She rents a trailer home on the property of town policeman Bill Houston (David Morse) and his wife Linda (Cara Seymour). She is also pursued by the shy but persistent Jeff (Peter Stormare), who also works at the factory.
Set in contemporary West Berlin (at the time still enclosed by the Berlin Wall), Wings of Desire follows two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, as they roam the city, unseen and unheard by its human inhabitants, observing and listening to the diverse thoughts of Berliners: a pregnant woman in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, a painter struggling to find inspiration, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Their raison d'être is, as Cassiel says, to "assemble, testify, preserve" reality. In addition to the story of two angels, the film is also a meditation on Berlin's past, present, and future. Damiel and Cassiel have always existed as angels; they existed in Berlin before it was a city, and before there were even any humans.
Thomas Hutter lives in the fictitious German city of Wisborg. His employer, Knock, sends Hutter to Transylvania to visit a new client named Count Orlok. Hutter entrusts his loving wife Ellen to his good friend Harding and Harding's sister Annie, before embarking on his long journey. Nearing his destination in the Carpathian mountains, Hutter stops at an inn for dinner. The locals become frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name and discourage him from traveling to his castle at night, warning of a werewolf on the prowl. The next morning, Hutter takes a coach to a high mountain pass, but the coachmen decline to take him any further than the bridge as nightfall is approaching. A black-swathed coach appears after Hutter crosses the bridge and the coachman gestures for him to climb aboard. Hutter is welcomed at a castle by Count Orlok. When Hutter is eating dinner and accidentally cuts his thumb, Orlok tries to suck the blood out, but his repulsed guest pulls his hand away.