The film is set in 16th-century northern Kerala. The plot unfolds at Puthooram, the house of great Kannappan Chekavar (Balan K. Nair). Kannappan Chekavar adopts the son of his estranged sister when the boy loses both his parents and brings him to Puthooram to live and learn with his cousins. The orphan boy, Chandu, a quick learner, earns the love and admiration of his uncle, while he is loathed by his cousin Aromal (Suresh Gopi).
A woman in a wedding dress, the Bride (Uma Thurman), lies wounded in a church, having been attacked by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. She tells their leader, Bill (David Carradine), that she is carrying his baby. He shoots her.
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.
Edo, 1630. Tsugumo Hanshirō arrives at the estate of the Ii clan and says that he wishes to commit seppuku within the courtyard of the palace. To deter him Saitō Kageyu (Rentarō Mikuni), the Daimyo's senior counselor, tells Hanshirō the story of another rōnin, Chijiiwa Motome – formerly of the same clan as Hanshirō.
Sansho the Bailiff is a jidai-geki, or historical film, set in the Heian period of feudal Japan. A virtuous governor is banished by a feudal lord to a far-off province. His wife and children are sent to live with her brother. Several years later, the wife, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), and children, Zushiō and Anju, journey to his exiled land, but are tricked on the journey by a treacherous priestess. The mother is sold into prostitution in Sado and the children are sold by slave traders to a manorial estate in which slaves are brutalized, working under horrific conditions and branded when they try to escape. The estate, protected under the Minister of the Right, is administered by the eponymous Sanshō (Eitarō Shindō), a bailiff (or steward). Sanshō's son Tarō (Akitake Kōno), the second-in-charge, is a much more humane master, and he convinces the two they must survive in the manor before they can escape to find their father.
In the Edo period of Japan, Isaburo Sasahara (Toshiro Mifune) is a vassal of the daimyo of the Aisu clan. Sasahara is the most skilled swordsman in the land, whose only rival in ability is his good friend Tatewaki Asano (Tatsuya Nakadai). Isaburo is in a loveless marriage with a shrew of a woman. One day one of the daimyo's advisors orders Isaburo's elder son Yogoro (Go Kato) to marry the daimyo's ex-concubine, Ichi (Yoko Tsukasa), even though she is the mother to one of the daimyo's sons. With much trepidation, the family agrees. In time, Ichi and Yogoro find love and happiness in the marriage and a daughter Tomi is born.
The film takes place in Koishikawa, a district of Edo (the former name of the city of Tokyo), in the 19th century. Young Dr. Noboru Yasumoto (Yūzō Kayama) is the film's protagonist. Trained in a Dutch medical school in Nagasaki, the arrogant Yasumoto aspires to the status of personal physician of the Shogunate, a position currently held by a close relative; his father is already a well-established, highly competent physician. Yasumoto believes that he should progress through the safe, and well-protected, army structure of medical education. However, for Yasumoto's post-graduate medical training, he has been assigned to a rural clinic under the guidance of Akahige ("Red Beard"), Dr. Kyojō Niide (played by Toshiro Mifune). Dr. Niide may seem like a tyrannical task master, but in reality he is a compassionate clinic director. Initially, Yasumoto is livid at his posting, believing that he has little to gain from working under Akahige. Dr. Yasumoto feels that Dr. Niide is only interested in his medical notes and soon rebels against the clinic director. He refuses to wear his uniform, disdains the food and spartan environment, and enters the forbidden garden where he meets "The Mantis" (Kyōko Kagawa), a mysterious patient that only Dr. Niide can treat.
An infamous hacker called Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is cornered in an abandoned hotel by police. She easily overpowers and escapes from them, but a group of sinister black-suited Agents with superhuman abilities lead the police in a rooftop pursuit after her. Upon picking up a ringing phone in a telephone booth, she vanishes without a trace.
It is 1860, and the era of the Tokugawa shogunate is coming to a close. A rōnin, or masterless samurai, wanders into a small town divided by a gang war between two gangsters, Seibei and Ushitora. Ushitora used to be Seibei's right-hand man, until Seibei decided that his son Yoichiro would succeed him. Tazaemon, the silk merchant and mayor, backs Seibei, while Tokuemon the sake brewer is allied with Ushitora. Gonji, the owner of an inn, advises the stranger to leave while he can, but after sizing up the situation, the rōnin tells Gonji that the town would be better off with both sides dead, and that he intends to stay.
The film opens on a woodcutter (木樵り; Kikori, played by Takashi Shimura) and a priest (旅法師; Tabi Hōshi, Minoru Chiaki) sitting beneath the Rajōmon city gate to stay dry in a downpour. A commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) joins them and they tell him that they have witnessed a disturbing story, which they then begin recounting to him. The woodcutter claims he found the body of a murdered samurai three days earlier while looking for wood in the forest; upon discovering the body, he says, he fled in a panic to notify the authorities. The priest says that he saw the samurai with his wife traveling the same day the murder happened. Both men were then summoned to testify in court, where they met the captured bandit Tajōmaru (多襄丸), who claimed responsibility for killing the samurai and raping his wife.
Hidetora Ichimonji, a powerful warlord, experiences a dream reminding him that he's showing his age and decides to divide his kingdom among his three sons: Taro, Jiro, and Saburo. Taro, the eldest, will receive the prestigious First Castle and become leader of the Ichimonji clan, while Jiro and Saburo will be given the Second and Third Castles. Hidetora will retain the title of Great Lord and Jiro and Saburo are to support Taro.
After the death of his father, Rocco Parondi (Alain Delon), one of the five sons of a poor rural Italian family travels north from Lucania to join his older brother Vincenzo in Milan by the matriarch Rosaria(Katina Paxinou). She is the "hand to which the five fingers belong" as she states in the film and she has a powerful influence on her sons. Presented in five distinct sections, the film weaves the story of the five brothers Vincenzo, Simone, Rocco, Ciro and Luca Parondi as each of them adapt to their new lives in the city.