Marauding bandits approach a rural mountain village, but their chief decides to spare it until after the harvest because they had raided it before. The plan is overheard by a farmer who tells the rest of village. Lamenting their fate, three farmers ask Gisaku, the village elder and miller, for advice. He declares they should hire samurai to defend the village. Since they have no money to offer, Gisaku tells them to find hungry samurai.
In Bedford Falls, New York, on Christmas Eve 1945, George Bailey is suicidal. Prayers for him reach Heaven. Clarence Odbody, Angel 2nd Class, is assigned to save George in order to earn his angel wings. To prepare Clarence, his superior Joseph shows flashbacks of George's life.
In October 1985, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and on the eve of nuclear war, a depressed Rorschach, one of several outlawed vigilante superheroes, begins to investigate why all former masked superheroes are either dead or have declined.
United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) is commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, which houses the Strategic Air Command 843rd Bomb Wing, equipped with B-52 bombers. The 843rd is currently in-flight on airborne alert, a few hours from the Soviet border.
Teenager Marty McFly is an aspiring musician dating girlfriend Jennifer Parker in Hill Valley, California. His father George is bullied by his supervisor, Biff Tannen, while his mother Lorraine is an overweight, depressed alcoholic. Whilst expressing disapproval of Marty's relationship with Jennifer, Lorraine recounts how she met George when her father hit him with a car.
In Muromachi period Japan, an Emishi village is attacked by a demon. The last Emishi prince, Ashitaka, kills the demon before it reaches the village, but its corruption curses his arm in the battle. The curse gives him superhuman fighting abilities, but will eventually kill him. The villagers discover that the demon was once a boar god, Nago, corrupted by an iron ball lodged in his body. The village's wise woman tells Ashitaka that he may find a cure in the western lands Nago was exiled from.
In 1941, SS colonel Hans Landa, the "Jew Hunter", interrogates French dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite as to the whereabouts of the last unaccounted-for Jewish family in the neighborhood. Under threat of continued harassment from the Germans, LaPadite reveals that the Dreyfus family is hidden under the floor. Landa orders SS soldiers to shoot through the floorboards and kill the family. All are killed except Shosanna, who escapes and flees through the field. Landa watches her go, deciding not to shoot her at the last second.
In 1912, 13-year-old Indiana Jones is horseback riding with his Boy Scout troop in Moab, Utah. While scouting caves, Indy discovers a group of grave robbers who have found a golden crucifix belonging to Coronado and steals it from them, hoping to donate it to a museum. The men give chase through a passing circus train, leaving Indy with a bloody cut across his chin from a bullwhip and new phobia of snakes. Indy escapes, but the local sheriff makes him return the crucifix. Impressed with Indy's bravery, the leader of the robbers gives Indy his fedora.
A man (Davos Hanich) is a prisoner in the aftermath of World War III in post-apocalyptic Paris where survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. Scientists research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel. The scientists eventually settle upon the prisoner; his key to the past is a vague but obsessive memory from his pre-war childhood of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) he had seen on the observation platform ("the jetty") at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a startling incident there. He had not understood exactly what happened but knew he had seen a man die.
In 1995, John Connor is ten years old and living in Los Angeles with foster parents. His mother Sarah Connor had been preparing him throughout his childhood for his future role as the leader of the Human Resistance against Skynet, but was arrested after attempting to bomb a computer factory and imprisoned at a mental hospital under the supervision of Dr. Silberman. Skynet sends a new Terminator, designated as T-1000, back in time to kill John. The T-1000 is an advanced prototype composed of a mimetic polyalloy that allows it to take on the shape and appearance of almost anything it touches, and transform parts of its anatomy into knives and other stabbing weapons. The T-1000 arrives under a freeway, kills a policeman and assumes his identity. Meanwhile, the future John Connor has sent back a reprogrammed T-800 (Model 101) Terminator to protect his younger self.
On May 12, 1984, two beings from the year 2029 arrive in Los Angeles: one is a Terminator T-800 Model 101, a cyborg assassin programmed to kill a young woman named Sarah Connor; the other is Kyle Reese, a soldier sent to protect her from the T-800. After the Terminator kills a gang member, a gun-shop manager, the two other women named "Sarah Connor" listed in the telephone directory, Sarah's roommate Ginger, and her partner, it tracks its target to the Technoir, a nightclub. Kyle arrives and saves Sarah from the Terminator. The two steal a car and escape, while the Terminator steals a police car and pursues them.
A bamboo cutter named Sanuki no Miyatsuko discovers a miniature girl inside a glowing bamboo shoot. Believing her to be a divine presence, Miyatsuko and his wife decide to raise her as their own, calling her "Princess". The girl grows rapidly and conspicuously, marveling her parents and earning her the nickname "Takenoko" (Little Bamboo) from the other children in the village. Sutemaru, the oldest among Kaguya's friends, develops a particularly close relationship with her.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Miami-Dade Police Department detective Kung Fury and his partner Dragon apprehend a red ninja in a back alley, but Dragon is sliced in half by the ninja while Kung Fury is suddenly struck by lightning and bitten by a cobra, giving him extraordinary kung fu powers that enable him to defeat his foe. Years later in 1985, after defeating a rogue arcade machine robot, Kung Fury quits the force when he is assigned to partner with Triceracop, fearing that he would lose another partner in the line of duty. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler, a.k.a. "Kung Führer", enters the timeline and remotely guns down the police chief and attacks the precinct through a mobile phone. Intent to avenge the chief, Kung Fury has computer whiz Hackerman send him back in time to kill Hitler in Nazi Germany. A glitch in the system, however, sends him back into the Viking Age. After Kung Fury meets the Viking valkyries Barbarianna and Katana, the Norse god Thor sends him to Nazi Germany for him to finish his job.
In an alternate 1982, an alien ship inexplicably stops over Johannesburg. When investigation teams enter the ship, they discover a population of sick and malnourished extraterrestrials, derogatorily referred to as "prawns". The South African government confines the aliens to "District 9", a government camp that is located outside of Johannesburg. Twenty-eight years later, in 2010, following periodic conflict between the aliens and the locals living near District 9, the government hires private military company Multinational United (MNU) to relocate the aliens to a new internment. Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), an Afrikaner bureaucrat, is appointed by Piet Smit (Louis Minnaar), an MNU executive and his father-in-law, to lead the relocation.
In the future, robots known as Sentinels are exterminating mutants and their human allies. A band of mutants, including Kitty Pryde, Colossus, Iceman, Bishop, Warpath, Blink and Sunspot, evade the Sentinels due to Pryde's ability to send a person's consciousness to the past. Pryde's group convenes with Logan, Storm, Professor Charles Xavier, and Erik Lehnsherr at a monastery in China. Pryde sends Logan's consciousness 50 years back in time to 1973 to prevent Mystique from assassinating Dr. Bolivar Trask, creator of the Sentinels. Following the assassination, Mystique was captured, and her DNA was used by Trask's company to improve the Sentinels, whose ability to adapt to any mutant power makes them almost invincible. Xavier and Lehnsherr advise Logan to find both of their younger selves for help.