Nader and Simin have been married for 14 years and live with their 11-year-old daughter Termeh in Tehran. The family belongs to the urban middle-class and the couple is on the verge of separation. Simin wants to leave the country with her husband and daughter, as she does not want Termeh to grow up under the prevailing conditions. This desire is not shared by Nader. He is concerned for his elderly father, who lives with the family and suffers from Alzheimer's disease. When Nader decides to stay in Iran, Simin files for divorce.
During the summer in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, elderly widow Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) constantly watches television, particularly infomercials hosted by Tappy Tibbons (Christopher McDonald). After receiving an unexpected phone call that she has won a spot to participate on a television game show, she becomes obsessed with regaining the youthful appearance she possesses in an old photograph from her son Harry's (Jared Leto) graduation many years earlier. In order to fit into her old red dress seen in the picture, the favorite one of her deceased husband Seymour, she goes on a crash diet. In order to reach her goal sooner, she goes to a doctor to discuss weight loss. The doctor gives her a prescription for weight-loss amphetamine pills throughout the day and a sedative at night. Harry warns her about amphetamine dependence and risk of life-threatening consequences, but she rebuffs him and insists that the chance to be on television has given her a reason to live. As the months go by, Sara's tolerance for the pills adjust and as a result she is no longer able to feel the same high the pills once gave her. When her invitation has still not arrived, she wrongfully increases her dosage from double to triple and, as a result, begins to suffer from amphetamine psychosis. Soon, her delusions worsen and she is driven to the brink of madness when she suffers a hallucination that she appears on the game show as the principal subject while being attacked by her monstrous, anthropomorphized refrigerator.
The film centers around the Borgen family in rural Denmark. The devout widower Morten, patriarch of the family, prominent member of the community, and patron of the local parish church, has three sons. Mikkel, the eldest, has no faith, but is happily married to the pious Inger, who is pregnant with their third child. Johannes, who went insane studying Søren Kierkegaard, believes himself to be Jesus Christ and wanders the farm condemning the age's lack of faith, including that of his family and the modern-minded new pastor of the village. The youngest son, Anders, is lovesick for the daughter of the leader of a local Christian religious sect.
William Peters follows Jane Elliott's conversely controversial and lauded schoolroom exercise of dividing an otherwise homogenous group of elementary school kids by their eye color. It was a demonstration of prejudice and discrimination meant to teach the students about the unfairness of racism, developed as a response to the shooting of Martin Luther King in April 1968. The film records Elliott in 1970 while conducting the exercise for the third time.
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.
Sybil is a shy, unassuming substitute grade school teacher. After suffering a small breakdown in front of her students, she is given a neurological examination by Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, a psychiatrist. Sybil admits to having blackouts and fears they are getting worse. Dr. Wilbur theorizes that the incidents are a kind of hysteria, all related to a deeper problem. She asks Sybil to return at a later date for more counseling.
Jack Torrance arrives at the mountain isolated Overlook Hotel, 25 miles from the closest town, Sidewinder, Colorado, interviewing for the position of winter caretaker, planning to use the hotel's solitude to write. The hotel, built on the site of a Native American burial ground, becomes snowed-in during the winter; it is closed from October to May. Manager Stuart Ullman warns Jack that a previous caretaker, Charles Grady, developed cabin fever and killed his family and himself. In Boulder, Jack's son, Danny Torrance, while brushing his teeth, has a terrifying premonition about the hotel, viewing a cascade of blood emerging from an elevator door, before falling in trance. Jack's wife, Wendy, tells a doctor that Danny has an imaginary friend named Tony, and that Jack has given up drinking because he dislocated Danny's shoulder following a binge.
In 1954, two U.S. Marshals - Edward "Teddy" Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule - travel to the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island located in Boston Harbor as part of an investigation into the disappearance of patient Rachel Solando, incarcerated for drowning her three children. The sole clue is a note left by Solando, which reads: "The law of 4; who is 67?" Shortly after arrival, a storm prevents their return to the mainland for several days. Daniels finds the staff confrontational: the lead psychiatrist, Dr. John Cawley, refuses to hand over records of the hospital staff; Solando's doctor, Dr. Lester Sheehan, had left on vacation after her disappearance, and they are barred from searching Ward C and told that the lighthouse on the island has already been searched, so there is no need to search it. When a patient is being interrogated by Daniels, with a subterfuge she sends Aule away for a few seconds and scribbles "RUN" in Daniels' notepad.
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.
In 1947, John Nash (Crowe) arrives at Princeton University. He is co-recipient, with Martin Hansen (Lucas), of the prestigious Carnegie Scholarship for mathematics. At a reception, he meets a group of other promising math and science graduate students, Richard Sol (Goldberg), Ainsley (Jason Gray-Stanford), and Bender (Rapp). He also meets his roommate Charles Herman (Bettany), a literature student.
The film covers Temple Grandin's life through a series of flashbacks. As a child, Grandin (Danes) was uncommunicative and prone to tantrums and is diagnosed with autism. The medical consensus at the time was that autism was a form of schizophrenia resulting from insufficient maternal affection. Despite recommendations to place her in an institution, Grandin's mother (Ormond) hires therapists and works to help her daughter adapt to social interaction.
The film focuses on the perpetrators of the Indonesian killings of 1965–66 in the present day; ostensibly towards the communist community where almost a million people were killed. When Suharto overthrew Sukarno, the President of Indonesia, following the failed coup of the 30 September Movement in 1965, the gangsters Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry in Medan (North Sumatra) were promoted from selling black market movie theatre tickets to leading the most powerful death squad in North Sumatra. They also extorted money from ethnic Chinese as the price for keeping their lives. Anwar is said to have personally killed 1,000 people.
Through a 1994 ballot measure (Measure 16) named the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, Oregon became the first U.S. state and one of the first jurisdictions in the world to allow physician-assisted suicide. How to Die in Oregon covers the background of the Oregon law and the life of a few patients who have chosen to take their life under it. It also features some information about the neighboring state of Washington's attempt to legalize physician-assisted suicide in 2008 through a law (Washington Death with Dignity Act) modeled after Oregon's.