On a snowy evening, the middle-aged bachelor Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) finds the self-diagnosed nymphomaniac Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) beaten up and lying in the alleyway behind his apartment. He takes her back to his home and, over tea, listens intently as Joe recounts the eventful story of her libidinous life. Seligman, a highly-educated but cloistered man, connects and analyzes Joe's stories with what he has read about.
Seoul, 1910. Hong Jin-ho, Joseon’s first detective, travels around solving trivial family disputes for pocket money as a private detective. However, he is determined to go to America someday and is saving up for the trip. Then one night, Gwang-soo, a medical physician in training, discovers a corpse in the woods and secretly takes it to practice dissecting. But the corpse turns out to be the son of Seoul’s most powerful man. While planning to flee in the middle of the night and afraid of murder accusations, Gwang-soo meets Jin-ho, and asks him to find the killer. When another corpse turns up in the woods, murdered in the same way as the first victim, Jin-ho and Gwang-soo use a piece of cloth they find in the victim’s mouth as the lead they need to bring them one step closer to the real killer.
Set in the 1950s, the film begins in medias res near the end of the story, with a confrontation between two men: one of them, Clare Quilty, drunk and incoherent, plays Chopin's Polonaise in A major, Op. 40, No. 1 on the piano before being shot from behind a portrait painting of a young woman. The shooter is Humbert Humbert, a 40-something British professor of French literature.
À la Crim', le capitaine Malinowski est souvent face à des affaires difficiles. Un jour, sa fille se fait violer puis tuer et sa vie bascule. À la vue de sa détresse, ses collègues mènent l'enquête très rapidement. Un homme, Daniel Eckmann, est très vite arrêté, puis condamné. Mais il se dit innocent et décide d'écrire une lettre au père de la victime, Malinowski. Ce dernier va alors douter des conclusions hâtives de l'enquête et va mener une contre-enquête en solitaire.
The film opens with a sexually charged, flirtatious online chat between two people with the screen names Thonggrrrl14 and Lensman319. Lensman319 is a photographer who admits to "fantasizing" about Thonggrrrl14. Thonggrrrl14 entices Lensman319 to meet at a café to "hook up". At the café, Thonggrrrl14 – Hayley Stark – meets Lensman319 – Jeff Kohlver. Hayley makes several references to her age (14 years old), yet succeeds in convincing Jeff to take her to his house. After showing her around, Hayley makes them both screwdrivers and asks him to take photographs. Before he can, Jeff gets dizzy, his vision blurs, and he falls to the floor unconscious.
The 10-year-old Natascha Kampusch (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) is kidnapped by Wolfgang Přiklopil (Thure Lindhardt) and spends 8 years in captivity until she manages to escape.
In 1917, during the last months of legal prostitution in Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans, Louisiana, Hattie is a prostitute working at an elegant brothel run by the elderly, cocaine-sniffing Madame Nell. Hattie has given birth to a baby boy and has a 12-year-old daughter, Violet, who lives in the house. When photographer Ernest J. Bellocq comes with his camera, Hattie and Violet are the only people awake. He asks to be allowed to take photographs of the women. Madame Nell agrees only after he offers to pay.
Walter (Kevin Bacon), a convicted child molester, returns home to Philadelphia after serving 12 years in prison. His friends and family have abandoned him, with the exception of his brother-in-law, Carlos (Benjamin Bratt). Walter's apartment is just across the street from an elementary school—an obvious source of temptation. He gets a job at a local lumber mill and meets Vicki (Kyra Sedgwick), one of the few women working there. After sleeping with Vicki, Walter reveals his history of molesting little girls. Vicki is clearly shocked and disturbed by this new information, but before she can consider how to respond to it, Walter tells her to leave his apartment.
The investigation into Arnold Friedman's life started after a federal sting operation, when he received a magazine of child pornography from the Netherlands by mail. In searching his Great Neck, New York home, investigators found a collection of child pornography. After learning that Friedman taught children computer classes from his home, local police began to suspect him of abusing his students.
Set in 1973, a young couple become entangled in a Chilean military coup at a time when there is much protest on the streets against General Augusto Pinochet. When Daniel is abducted by Pinochet's secret police DINA, Lena tries to find and save her husband. She tracks him to a sealed-off village called "Colonia Dignidad", which presents itself as a charitable mission run by a lay preacher, Paul Schäfer, but is in fact a place from which no one has ever escaped. Lena decides to join the cult to attempt to rescue her husband.
Hiroshi Hada, a Japanese businessman in a troubled marriage, sees a woman being groped in a crowded Tokyo subway. He is fascinated by the fact that she moans silently, involuntarily orgasms, but does not cry out or let people know she is being sexually molested. When Hada is transferred to Los Angeles, he has too much to drink at a business party and tries to imitate what he saw by groping a Caucasian school girl while riding a crowded bus. But unlike the Japanese woman that Hada saw in Japan, the American girl screams. Hada runs away, but is robbed and beaten by a mugger. Meanwhile, several innocent Asian men are beaten by bystanders who suspect that one of them is the man who groped the girl.
Trish Maplewood, the eldest Jordan sister, is an upper middle class housewife happily married to psychiatrist Bill Maplewood and has three children. Unbeknownst to Trish, however, Bill is a pedophile who is obsessed with 11-year-old Johnny Grasso, a classmate of their son, Billy. When Johnny comes to the Jordan house for a sleepover, Bill drugs and rapes him. Later, Bill learns that another boy, Ronald Farber, is home alone while his parents are away in Europe. Under the guise of attending a PTA meeting, Bill drives to the boy's house and rapes him as well. After Johnny is taken to the hospital and found to have been sexually abused, the police arrive at the Maplewood residence to question Bill. After alerting his wife to the police presence, Bill begins by asking the two detectives, "You said something about Ronald Farber?" The two detectives, looking puzzled, say nothing. Bill then stammers, "I mean, Johnny Grasso." Out on bail, he tearfully admits to Billy that he "fucked" the boys, that he enjoyed it, and that he would do it again. When Billy asks, "Would you ever fuck me?", his father replies, "No... I jerk off instead.
In 1944 in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy, four wealthy men of power, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President, agree to marry each other's daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. They recruit four teenage boys to act as guards and four young soldiers (called "studs", "cockmongers", or "fuckers"), who are chosen because of their big penises. They then kidnap nine young men and nine young women and take them to a palace near Salò. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, who recount arousing stories for the men, who sadistically exploit their victims.
Howie Blitzer is deeply affected by the death of his mother in a car accident on the Long Island Expressway. His situation is exacerbated by his acrimonious relationship with his distant father Marty, who brought a trophy girlfriend into the house less than a month after his wife's death. Howie's only solace is the company of his best friend Gary, a juvenile delinquent and hustler. Although Gary is attracted to Howie, Howie is unsure of his own sexuality. They have two other friends their age, one of whom has an incestuous relationship with his sister. The four boys routinely break into neighborhood houses.