Pierre Delacroix (whose real name is Peerless Dothan), is an uptight, Harvard University-educated black man, working for the television network CNS. At work, he has to endure torment from his boss Thomas Dunwitty, a tactless, boorish white man. Not only does Dunwitty talk like an urban black man, and use the word "nigger" repeatedly in conversations, he also proudly proclaims that he is more black than Delacroix and that he can use nigger since he is married to a black woman and has two mixed-race children. Dunwitty frequently rejects Delacroix's scripts for television series that portray black people in positive, intelligent scenarios, dismissing them as "Cosby clones".
Amantha Starr (Yvonne De Carlo) is raised as the privileged white daughter of a Kentucky plantation owner. However, after he dies, a shocking secret is revealed: unbeknownst to Amantha, her mother had been one of her father's black slaves. Legally now property, she is taken by a slave trader to New Orleans to be sold. On the riverboat ride there, he makes it clear that he intends to sleep with her, but desists when she tries to hang herself; as a beautiful, cultured young woman who can pass for white, she is far too valuable to risk losing.
Omar Ali is a young man living in Battersea in the Wandsworth area of South London, right by the railway station during the mid-1980s. His father, Hussein, once a famous left-wing British Pakistani journalist in Bombay, lives in London but hates Britain's society and its international politics. His dissatisfaction with the world and a family tragedy have led him to sink into alcoholism, so that Omar has to be his carer. By contrast, Omar's paternal uncle Nasser is a successful entrepreneur and an active member of the London Pakistani community. Omar's father asks his uncle to give Omar a job and, after working for a brief time as a car washer in one of his uncle's garages, he is assigned the task of managing a run-down laundrette and turning it into a profitable business.
Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) leaves his native China because he "dreams to spread the gentle message of Buddha to the Anglo-Saxon lands." His idealism fades as he is faced with the brutal reality of London's gritty inner-city. However, his mission is finally realized in his devotion to the "broken blossom" Lucy Burrows (Lillian Gish), the beautiful but unwanted and abused daughter of boxer Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp).
In 1965, Peter Joseph "Peejoe" Bullis lives in a small town in Alabama during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He becomes involved with a group of black students protesting the town's racially segregated municipal swimming pool, leading to a protest that explodes into deadly violence. A young black boy, Taylor Jackson, is killed by the town sheriff. Peejoe, the only witness, is pressured by the sheriff to keep it quiet. However, Peejoe has learned from the example of his free-spirited Aunt Lucille Vinson, who has killed her abusive husband and is headed for Hollywood, where she is convinced that television stardom awaits her.
The film starts out in live action, introducing the protagonist Michael Corleone, a 24-year-old virgin playing pinball in New York City. The scene then transitions into animation. New York has a diseased, rotten, tough, and violent atmosphere. Michael's Italian father, Angelo "Angie" Corleone, is a struggling mafioso who frequently cheats on Michael's Jewish mother, Ida. The couple constantly bicker and try to kill each other. Michael ambles through a catalog of freaks, greasers, and dopers. Unemployed, he dabbles with cartoons, artistically feeding off the grubbiness of his environment. He regularly hangs out at a local bar where he gets free drinks from the female black bartender, Carole, in exchange for sketches of the somewhat annoying Shorty, Carole's violent, legless bouncer devotee. One of the regular customers at the bar named Snowflake, a nymphomaniac transvestite, gets beaten up by a tough drunk who has only just realized that Snowflake is a man in drag and not a beautiful woman. Shorty throws the drunk out and the bar's white manager abusively confronts Carole over this. Fed up with her manager, Carole quits.
The movie deals with the story of Afrikaner poet Anna Malan (Binoche) and an American journalist, Langston Whitfield (Jackson), sent to South Africa to report about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
Sam Lee (Barthelmess) is the son of a Chinese merchant, Lee Ying, in San Francisco's Chinatown. He is tolerated in white dominated social circles because of his wealth. One day, he leaves college after being insulted by three racist white girls who thought they were too good to be seen going out with a "dirty yellow Chinaman". He takes a tour around the world and ends up in the Riviera where he is introduced to Allana Wagner (Bennett).
An idealistic reporter, Ward Jansen, and his younger brother, Jack Jansen, investigate the events surrounding a murder in an effort to exonerate a man on death row, Hillary Van Wetter. Van Wetter has been jailed for the murder of an unscrupulous local sheriff, Thurmond Call. Call had previously stomped Van Wetter's handcuffed cousin to death. Van Wetter is now awaiting execution. The Jansens are helped by Ward's colleague, Englishman Yardley Acheman, and Charlotte Bless, a woman whom Van Wetter has never met but who has fallen in love with him and is determined that he should be released and that they should marry. In prison Van Wetter regularly receives correspondence from her.
Daniel Balint is a former Jewish yeshiva student, brilliant but troubled, who is now a fanatically violent Neo-Nazi in New York in his early 20s. As a child, he often challenged his teachers with unorthodox interpretations of scripture. He once argued that the Binding of Isaac was not about Abraham's faith but God's power: that God did not want Abraham to accomplish a particular task but instead asks unquestioning obedience, which Abraham refuses to give. He concluded that God is a bully.
Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Bigger Thomas, an African American who lives in an impoverished neighborhood, is employed by a prosperous white family who live in the suburbs of a major city. The money Bigger makes at his new job will be used to supplement his mother's income. As a chauffeur, he is directed by the father of the family to take Mary, the daughter, to the university. Instead, Mary decides to pick up her Socialist boyfriend, Jan, and to spend the time drinking and partying.
At Dark Waters, a Native American sacred land containing an enigmatic swamp spirit, a teenager is murdered by a plant-like monster. The following day, young replacement sheriff Kyle Williams reaches Bywater and meets with deputy sheriff Fraser, who tells him the previous sheriff is among 47 missing persons since oil tycoon Fred Schist bought the ancient tribal lands from shaman and Seminole chieftain Ted Sallis, the first to disappear. Schist claimed Sallis had sold legally and escaped with the money, and asked the sheriff for help: Local protestors opposed his perfectly legal activities, and mestizo scoundrel Renee Laroque was sabotaging his facilities. Williams investigated this while trying to find an explanation for the missing people, some of which were found brutally murdered with plants growing from inside their bodies. Photographer Mike Ploog and shaman Pete Horn tell Williams local legends about the guardian spirit, suggesting that it could be real.
Paper Clips takes place in the rural, blue-collar Tennessee community of Whitwell, where a middle-school class attempts to gauge the magnitude of World War II's Holocaust by collecting paper clips, each of which represents a human life lost in the Nazis' slaughter of Jews. The idea came in 1998 from three of the teachers at the school and was completed in their eighth grade classrooms. The students ultimately succeeded in collecting over 25 million paperclips.
Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) lives in an average suburban neighborhood with his seemingly liberal housewife Althea (Estelle Parsons), who tolerates her husband's character flaws out of love. Every morning when Jeff wakes up, he spends some time under a tanning machine, hits the speedbag, drinks a health drink, and races the bus to work on foot.