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.
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.
In a fairy tale, Princess Moanna, whose father is the king of the underworld, visits the human world, where the sunlight blinds her and erases her memory. She becomes mortal and succumbs to illness. The king believes that eventually, her spirit will return to the underworld.
Persona begins with images of camera equipment and projectors lighting up and projecting dozens of brief cinematic glimpses, including a crucifixion, an erect penis, a tarantula spider, clips from a comedic silent-film reel first seen in Bergman's Prison (depicting a man trapped in a room, being chased by Death and Satan), and the slaughter of a lamb. The last, and longest, glimpse features a boy who wakes up in a hospital next to several corpses, reading Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time ("Vår Tids Hjälte" in the film), and caressing a blurry, transient image that shifts between Elisabet and/or Alma's faces.
Leenie (Redgrave) is a middle-aged Irish-American schoolteacher with three grown daughters. Yet she unexpectedly finds herself pregnant again and is delighted. However her doctor rejects this possibility because of an unreliable blood test and her age. Thus her symptoms such as troubled sleeping and sickness are mis-diagnosed as psychogenic. She is prescribed a host of medications to cope with these difficulties. However it later turns out that she is in fact pregnant and that these medications have been causing irreversible damage to her unborn baby. Faced with the truth that her child will be born with defects, she faces a decision to keep the baby or go against her religious beliefs and have an abortion.
Minneapolis car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is desperate for money. Shep Proudfoot (Steve Reevis), an ex-convict, gives him a name; he travels to Fargo, North Dakota, where he hires two men (Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare)) to kidnap his wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd), and ransom her for $80,000, knowing his wealthy father-in-law and boss, Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell) will pay. In return, Lundegaard will give Showalter and Grimsrud a new 1987 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, and half of the ransom money.
A poison-gas attack on a Kolkata Metro Rail compartment kills the passengers on board. Two years later Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan), a pregnant software engineer, arrives in Kolkata from London during the Durga Puja festivities in search of her missing husband, Arnab Bagchi. A police officer, Satyoki "Rana" Sinha (Parambrata Chatterjee), offers to help. Although Vidya claims that Arnab went to Kolkata on an assignment for the National Data Center (NDC), initial investigations suggest that no such person was employed by the NDC.
Akiko Sugiyama (Ineko Arima) is a young college graduate girl learning English shorthand. Her elder sister Takako (Setsuko Hara), running away from an unhappy marriage, has returned home to stay with Akiko and their father Shukichi (Chishū Ryū) in Tokyo, together with her toddler girl. Shukichi works in a bank in Tokyo. Akiko has a relationship with her college boyfriend Kenji, which results in an unwanted pregnancy. Later, Akiko has an abortion after an encounter in which she realizes that her boyfriend does not love her.
In 1965, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), a bright but somewhat naive young housewife, and Guy (John Cassavetes), her husband and a struggling actor, move into the Bramford, an antiquated New York City apartment building. The couple learns from the building's manager, Mr. Nicklas (Elisha Cook, Jr.), that their new residence was previously inhabited by Mrs. Gardenia, an elderly woman who had seemingly gone senile. Guy also discovers a dresser concealing a simple closet which contains nothing except a vacuum cleaner and a few other household items. Their friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) tries to dissuade them from taking the apartment, informing them of some of the Bramford's rather unseemly history but, undeterred, Rosemary and Guy move into the building.
Grace is the young supervisor of Short Term 12, a group home for troubled teenagers. She lives with her long-term boyfriend and coworker, Mason, but finds it difficult to open up to him emotionally. When Grace finds out she is pregnant, she schedules an appointment for an abortion; she eventually tells an overjoyed Mason about the pregnancy, but not about her plan to have an abortion. At the facility, Grace and Mason focus their efforts on Marcus, a Short Term 12 resident who is about to turn 18 and is struggling with the prospect of leaving the facility.
In 2027, after 18 years of global human infertility, civilization is on the brink of collapse as humanity faces extinction. The United Kingdom, the only stable nation with a functioning government, is deluged by asylum seekers fleeing the chaos and war which have taken hold around the world. In response, Britain has become a militarized police state as British government forces round up and detain immigrants. Theo Faron, a former activist turned cynical bureaucrat, is kidnapped by the Fishes, a militant immigrants' rights group. They are led by Theo's estranged wife, Julian Taylor, from whom he separated after their son's death.
The film follows the story of Otilia Mihartescu (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabriela "Găbița" Dragut (Laura Vasiliu), two university friends in an unnamed Romanian town. The film is set in 1987, one of the last years of the Ceaușescu regime. When Găbița becomes pregnant, the two girls arrange a meeting with Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) in a hotel, where he is to perform an illegal abortion (Communist Romania had a natalist policy against abortion).