Lucas is a member of a close-knit Danish community and works at a local kindergarten. Divorced, he struggles to maintain a relationship with his teenage son, who lives with his ex-wife, but enjoys wholesome interaction with the children at the kindergarten. His coworker Nadja makes advances towards him and eventually moves in as his girlfriend.
A group of children are playing an elimination game in the courtyard of an apartment building in Berlin using a chant about a murderer of children. A woman sets the table for dinner, waiting for her daughter to come home from school. A wanted poster warns of a serial killer preying on children, as anxious parents wait outside a school.
The film starts with the Polaroid photograph of a dead man. As the sequence plays backwards the photo reverts to its undeveloped state, entering the camera before the man is shot in the head. This is followed by interspersed black-and-white and color sequences, with the black-and-white sequences taking place chronologically before the color sequences.
Travis Bickle, an honorably discharged U.S. Marine, is a lonely and depressed man in New York City. He becomes a taxi driver to cope with chronic insomnia, driving passengers every night around the boroughs of New York City. He also spends time in seedy porn theaters and keeps a diary. Travis becomes infatuated with Betsy, a campaign volunteer for Senator and presidential candidate Charles Palantine. After watching her interact with fellow worker Tom through her window, Travis enters to volunteer as a pretext to talk to her, and takes her out for coffee. On a later date, he takes her to see a Swedish sex education film, which offends her, and she goes home alone. His attempts at reconciliation by sending flowers are rebuffed, so he berates her at the campaign office, before being kicked out by Tom.
Part 1
On the eve of the American Civil War in 1861, Scarlett O'Hara lives at Tara, her family's cotton plantation in Georgia, with her parents and two sisters. Scarlett learns that Ashley Wilkes—whom she secretly loves—is to be married to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton, and the engagement is to be announced the next day at a barbecue at Ashley's home, the nearby plantation Twelve Oaks.
Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his wife Grace (Maria Bello) attend a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of their friends, Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy (Viola Davis) Birch. The children go for a walk in the neighborhood and approach a campervan that is parked outside a house nearby. There is music playing, which suggests there is somebody inside. After dinner, both families' younger daughters, Anna Dover and Joy Birch, go missing.
The Virgin Spring tells the story, set in the late medieval Sweden, of a prosperous Christian whose daughter, Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), is appointed to take candles to the church. Karin is accompanied by her pregnant servant Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), who secretly worships the Norse deity Odin. Along their way through the forest on horseback, Ingeri becomes frightened when they come to a stream-side mill and the two part and Karin sets out on her own.
In December 2002, Mikael Blomkvist, publisher of Millennium magazine, loses a libel case involving allegations he published about billionaire financier Hans-Erik Wennerström. He is sentenced to three months in prison and a hefty fine. Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant but damaged surveillance agent and hacker, is hired by Henrik Vanger, the patriarch of the wealthy Vanger family, to investigate Blomkvist. Vanger then hires Blomkvist to investigate the disappearance of his niece, Harriet, who vanished on Children's Day in 1966. Vanger believes that Harriet was murdered by a family member.
Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard was successful in cultivating an artificial skin resistant to burns and insect bites, which he calls "GAL", that he says he has been testing on athymic mice. He presents his results in a medical symposium but when he privately discloses he has also conducted illegal transgenic experiments on humans, he is forbidden to continue with his research.
Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve), a Belgian manicurist who bites her nails, lives in Kensington, London, with her older sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux). Carol practically sleepwalks through her days, and interacts awkwardly with men. A would-be suitor, Colin (John Fraser), is flummoxed by her behaviour and she rebuffs his advances, disgusted by them. She hides her head in her pillow against her sister's cries of sexual pleasure with her married boyfriend, Michael (Ian Hendry). When Helen leaves on a holiday to Italy with Michael, Carol appears even more distracted at work, gets sent home, stays in the apartment, leaves a raw, skinned rabbit out to rot, and begins to hallucinate, first seeing the walls cracking, a man breaking in and molesting her, then hands reaching out to grab and attack her. Colin breaks into her apartment when she refuses to acknowledge his adoration and he apologizes for his transgression. When he says he wants to "be with" her "all the time," she bludgeons him to death with a candlestick, dumps the body into the overflowing bathtub, and nails the broken door shut.
A high-powered car races through the French countryside. A young woman is in the passenger seat. It enters a small village at high speed. It hits Charles Thénier's nine-year-old son, returning from the beach, and drives on without stopping. Charles vows to have his revenge, keeping a journal of his thoughts.
A Christian musical procession waits outside a prison for Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), a recently reformed female prisoner, who had been convicted of murdering a young schoolboy, Won-mo. The case, a national sensation because of her young age at the time of the murder and innocent appearance, earns her a lengthy prison sentence, reduced because of her apparent spiritual transformation in prison and her good conduct toward other inmates, results in the nickname of the "Kind-Hearted Geum-Ja". As Lee Geum-ja emerges from prison, she immediately sidesteps the procession, intent on revenge.
In Montauban in 1944, during the German retreat from France, Julien Dandieu is an ageing, embittered surgeon in the local hospital. Frightened by the German army entering Montauban, Dandieu asks his friend Francois to drive his wife and his daughter to the remote village where he owns a chateau. One week later, Dandieu sets off to meet them for the weekend, but the Germans have now occupied the village. He finds that all the villagers have been herded into the church and shot. In the château, he finds his daughter shot and his wife immolated by a flame-thrower.
Bhind, 1968 Phoolan is married to a twenty-something fellow called Puttilal (Aditya Shrivastava). Though child marriages are customary during that time, Phoolan's mother Moola (Savitri Raekwar) objects to the timing of the match. Phoolan's aging father Devideen (Ram Charan Nirmalker) conforming to his culture, regrettably disagrees, and Phoolan is sent off with Puttilal.