In Harlem, 10-year-old Annie Bennett lives in foster care with several other girls in the care of the cruel Colleen Hannigan. She spends each Friday waiting outside the restaurant Domani's where she believes her parents will return to collect her.
Peter (Levi Miller) is a young boy who is left as a baby on the steps of an orphanage in London by his mother Mary (Amanda Seyfried), an establishment under the care of Mother Barnabas (Kathy Burke). Several years later, during World War II,The Cold War, upon learning that she is hoarding food for herself, Peter and his best friend Nibs try to steal it to distribute amongst themselves and the other orphans but they get caught. In the process, Peter finds a letter written by his mother, declaring her love and assuring Peter they will meet again "in this world or another".
Steven Taylor (Michael Douglas) is a Wall Street hedge fund manager whose investments and speculations allow him to live an extravagant upper class lifestyle with his much younger wife Emily (Gwyneth Paltrow). Unfortunately for Taylor, his illegal investments are unraveling; to alleviate the pressure being put on him by large upcoming margin payments he will need his wife's personal fortune (roughly 100 million dollars) to maintain that status and lifestyle.
An aging couple, Ethel and Norman Thayer, continue the long tradition of spending each summer at their cottage on a lake in the far reaches of northern New England called Golden Pond. When they first arrive, Ethel notices the loons calling on the lake "welcoming them home". As they resettle into their summer home, Norman's memory problems arise when he is unable to recognize several family photographs, which he copes with by frequently talking about death and growing old. They are visited by their only child, a daughter, Chelsea, who is somewhat estranged from her curmudgeon of a father. She introduces her parents to her fiance Bill and his thirteen-year-old son Billy. Norman tries to play mind games with Bill, an apparent pastime of his, but Bill won't hear of it, saying he can only take so much. In another conversation, Chelsea discusses with Ethel her frustration over her relationship with her overbearing father, feeling that even though she lives thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, she still feels like she's answering to him. Before they depart for a European vacation, Chelsea and Bill ask the Thayers to permit Billy to stay with them while they have some time to themselves. Norman, seeming more senile and cynical than usual due to his 80th birthday and heart palpitations, agrees to Billy's staying. Ethel tells him that he's the sweetest man in the world, but she is the only one who knows it.
In the opening scene, twenty-four-year-old Alice Ayres (Natalie Portman) and Dan Woolf (Jude Law) see each other for the first time from opposite sides of a street as they are walking toward each other among many other rush hour pedestrians. Alice is a young American stripper who just arrived in London, and Dan is an unsuccessful British author who is on his way to work where he writes obituaries for a newspaper. Alice looks in the wrong direction as she crosses the street and is hit by a taxi cab right in front of Dan's eyes. After he rushes to her side she smiles to him and says, "Hello, stranger." He takes her to the hospital where Alice is treated and released. Afterward, on the way to his office, they stop by Postman's Park, the same park that he and his father visited after his mother's death. Pausing in front of the office before he leaves her and goes to work, he reminds her that traffic in England tends to come on from the right, and on impulse, he asks her for her name. They soon become lovers.
A criminologist narrates the tale of the newly engaged couple Brad Majors and Janet Weiss who find themselves lost and with a flat tire on a cold and rainy late November evening. Seeking a telephone, the couple walk to a nearby castle where they discover a group of strange and outlandish people who are holding an Annual Transylvanian Convention. They are soon swept into the world of Dr. Frank N. Furter, a self-proclaimed "sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania". The ensemble of convention attendees also includes servants Riff Raff, his sister Magenta, and a groupie named Columbia.
Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is a faded Hollywood actor best known for playing the superhero Birdman decades ago in a series of films. He is often tormented by the mocking, critical inner voice of Birdman, and frequently visualizes himself performing feats of levitation and telekinesis. The film opens with a quotation from Raymond Carver stating that the main fulfillment in life is related to having once been loved, then cuts to a dramatic atmospheric disturbance resembling a meteor descending in flames. The film then cuts to a surreal shot depicting Riggan as levitating in his stage room. Riggan hopes to reinvent his career by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway production of a loosely based adaptation of Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love".
Annelle Dupuy (Daryl Hannah), a reserved and ditzy beauty school graduate, is hired by Truvy Jones (Dolly Parton) to work in her home-based beauty salon in northwestern Louisiana. At the same time in another part of the neighbourhood, M'Lynn Eatenton (Sally Field) and her daughter, Shelby (Julia Roberts), are preparing for Shelby's wedding day, which is taking place later that day. They arrive, along with Clairee Belcher (Olympia Dukakis), the cheerful widow of the late former mayor, to have their hair done. Suddenly, Shelby, who has type one diabetes, falls into a hypoglycemic state but recovers quickly with the help of her mother's persistence and quick thinking. M'Lynn explains that Shelby was recently informed by doctors that she isn't able to have children.
Po Sing (Jon Kit Lee) is waiting for someone in a club in a predominantly African American neighborhood when a group of angry patrons try to start a fight with him. His father's right-hand man Kai (Russell Wong) and his Asian henchmen pull Po out of the club after a brief fight with the bouncers before the meeting can take place. The next day, Po is found murdered.
Tracy Turnblad is an overweight high school student living in Baltimore, Maryland ("Good Morning Baltimore"). She and her classmate Penny Pingleton watch the The Corny Collins Show, a local teen dance television show, together ("The Nicest Kids in Town").
The story begins in 1823 as the elderly Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) attempts suicide by slitting his throat while loudly begging forgiveness for having killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) in 1791. Placed in a lunatic asylum for the act, Salieri is visited by Father Vogler (Richard Frank), a young priest who seeks to hear his confession. Salieri is sullen and uninterested but eventually warms to the priest and launches into a long "confession" about his relationship with Mozart.
Set in London, circa 1900, George and Mary Darling's preparations to attend a party are disrupted by the antics of their boys, John and Michael, acting out a story about Peter Pan and the pirates, told to them by their older sister, Wendy. Their father, who is fed up with the stories that have made his children less practical, angrily declares that Wendy has gotten too old to continue staying in the nursery with them, and it's time for her to grow up and have a room of her own. That night, they are visited in the nursery by Peter Pan himself, who teaches them to fly with the help of his pixie friend, Tinker Bell, and takes them with him to the island of Never Land.
In 1905, Tevye, a poor Jewish milkman living in the Russian village of Anatevka, explains to the audience what keeps the Jews of Anatevka going is the balance they achieve through following their ancient traditions, comparing their precarious circumstance to a fiddler on a roof: trying to scratch out a pleasant tune, while not breaking their necks. The fiddler appears throughout the film as a metaphoric reminder of the Jews' ever-present fears and danger, and also as a symbol of the traditions Tevye is trying to hold on to as his world changes around him. While in town, Tevye meets Perchik, a radical Marxist from Kiev. Tevye invites Perchik to stay with him and his family, and as a deal, offers him food, in exchange for Perchik tutoring his daughters.
Pierre Brochant, a Parisian publisher, attends a weekly "idiots' dinner", where guests, who are modish, prominent Parisian businessmen, must bring along an "idiot" who the other guests can ridicule. At the end of the dinner, the evening's "champion idiot" is selected.