On the occasion of his daughter Connie's wedding, Vito Corleone hears requests in his role as the Godfather, the Don of a New York crime family. Vito's youngest son, Michael, wearing a Marine Corps uniform, introduces his girlfriend, Kay Adams, to his family at the reception. Johnny Fontane, a famous singer and godson to Vito, seeks his help in securing a movie role; Vito dispatches his consigliere, Tom Hagen, to Los Angeles to talk the abrasive studio head, Jack Woltz, into giving Johnny the part. Woltz is unmoved until he wakes up in bed with the severed head of his prized stallion.
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.
In 1901, Corleone, Sicily, nine-year-old Vito Andolini’s family is killed after his father insults local Mafia chieftain Don Ciccio. He escapes to New York and is registered as "Vito Corleone" on Ellis Island.
Ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino and her parents are traveling to their new home when her father takes a wrong turn. They unknowingly enter a magical world that Chihiro's father insists on exploring, believing it to be an abandoned amusement park. Her parents sit at an empty, but seemingly-operational, restaurant stall, and begin to devour the fresh food in a piggish manner; meanwhile, Chihiro discovers an exquisite bathhouse across a bridge, where a young boy named Haku warns her to get out before the impending sunset. Frantically, Chihiro returns to her parents, only to discover that they have literally transformed into pigs. She attempts to escape, but the way by which they came has since become submerged. Frightened and alone, she observes as the world she ventured into reveals itself as a luxurious retreat for spirits to revitalize themselves.
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.
Henry Hill says, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster", referring to his idolizing the Lucchese crime family gangsters in his blue-collar, predominantly Italian-American neighborhood in East New York, Brooklyn. Wanting to be part of something significant, Henry quits school and goes to work for them. He is able to make a living for himself and learns the two most important lessons in life: "Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut", the advice given to him after being acquitted of criminal charges early in his career.
The film begins at Sannomiya Station on 21 September 1945, shortly after the end of World War II. A boy, Seita (清太), is shown dying of starvation. Later that night, having removed Seita's body, a janitor digs through his possessions and finds a candy tin which he throws away into a nearby field. The spirit of Seita's younger sister, Setsuko (節子), springs from the tin and is joined by Seita's spirit as well as a cloud of fireflies. Seita's spirit then begins to narrate their story accompanied by an extended flashback of the final months of World War II.
In Rome, in the 1980s, famous Italian film director Salvatore Di Vita returns home late one evening, where his girlfriend sleepily tells him that his mother called to say someone named Alfredo has died. Salvatore obviously shies from committed relationships and has not been to his home village of Giancaldo, Sicily in 30 years. As his girlfriend asks him who Alfredo is, Salvatore flashes back to his childhood.
The Best of Youth is a family saga set in Italy from 1966 through 2003. It chronicles the life of an Italian family, the Caratis, but focuses primarily on two brothers, Matteo (Alessio Boni) and Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio), documenting their journey from the prime of their wild youth in the mid-1960s counterculture, to parenthood and retirement in the early 2000s. The film aims to show the interaction of the personal and the political, the ways in which small events may become turning points in the important choices made by individuals.
A wealthy executive named Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) is in a struggle to gain control of a company called National Shoes. One faction wants the company to make cheap, low quality shoes for the impulse market as opposed to the sturdy but unfashionable shoes currently being produced. Gondo believes that the long-term future of the company will be best served by well made shoes with modern styling, though this plan is unpopular because it means lower profits in the short term. He has secretly set up a leveraged buyout to gain control of the company, mortgaging all he has.
The story is told from the viewpoint of Lt. Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer), who has been assigned as a war correspondent on the German submarine U-96 in October 1941. He meets its captain (Jürgen Prochnow), chief engineer (Klaus Wennemann), and the crew in a French nightclub. Thomsen (Otto Sander), another captain, gives a crude drunken speech to celebrate his Ritterkreuz award, in which he openly mocks not only Winston Churchill but implicitly Adolf Hitler as well.
Dominick "Dom" Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are "extractors", people who perform corporate espionage using an experimental military technology to infiltrate the subconscious of their targets and extract information while experiencing shared dreaming. Their latest target is Japanese businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe). The extraction from Saito fails when sabotaged by a memory of Cobb's deceased wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). Saito reveals that he was actually auditioning the team to perform the difficult act of "inception": planting an idea in a person's subconscious.
The film follows former dolphin trainer and activist Ric O'Barry's quest to document the dolphin hunting operations in Taiji, Wakayama, Japan. In the 1960s, O'Barry helped capture and train the five wild dolphins who shared the role of "Flipper" in the hit television series of the same name. The show, very popular, fueled widespread public adoration of dolphins, influencing the development of marine parks that included dolphins in their attractions. After one of the dolphins, in O'Barry's opinion, committed a form of suicide in his arms by closing her blowhole voluntarily in order to suffocate, O'Barry came to see the dolphin's captivity and the dolphin capture industry as a curse, not a blessing. Days later, he was arrested off the island of Bimini, attempting to cut a hole in the sea pen in order to set free a captured dolphin. Since then, according to the film, O'Barry has dedicated himself full-time as an advocate on behalf of dolphins around the world.