In an Italian seaside town, young Titta gets into trouble with his friends and watches various local eccentrics as they engage in often absurd behavior. Frequently clashing with his stern father and defended by his doting mother, Titta witnesses the actions of a wide range of characters, from his extended family to Fascist loyalists to sensual women, with certain moments shifting into fantastical scenarios.
Inside the Blue Note nightclub one night in 1959 Paris, an aged, ailing jazzman coaxes an eloquent wail from his tenor sax. Outside, a young Parisian too broke to buy a glass of wine strains to hear those notes. Soon they will form a friendship that sparks a final burst of genius.
A committed film director struggles to complete his movie while coping with a myriad of crises, personal and professional, among the cast and crew.
Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for health reasons. There, he becomes obsessed with the stunning beauty of an adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido as Aschenbach.
Six people travel by train overnight from Marseilles to Paris. When the train arrives at its destination, one of the passengers, a girl, is found dead in a sleeping berth. The police led by Inspector Grazzi investigate the other five passengers, suspecting that one of them was responsible. However, as the investigation is stepped up, the other passengers start turning up dead. It is then up to the last remaining two to solve the case, before they become the next victims.
An American scientist is sent by the CIA to East Germany to retrieve a secret microfilm from a Soviet scientist interested in defecting to the West but the Stasi secret police's surveillance complicates matters.
Detective Baldassarre spends his forced exile sorting criminal records. He gets a chance to return to the line of fire when two people, an aristocrat and a worker are struck by lightning inside a fancy mansion. The incident would be relegated to freak accidents, but Baldassare's attention is drawn to the strangeness of the events and he begins to investigate.
A criminal (Giuliano Gemma) seeks vengeance when his double-dealing brother (Klaus Kinski) steals his jewels and mutilates his shooting hand.
Louise lives alone and seems to like it that way. She has been through a divorce and the recent death of her mother. Recently, she has moved to Annecy, a moderate-sized city, to take work as a schoolteacher. She encounters a much younger man, Luigi, an Italian who is down on his luck. Though he moved to France to find work, he was robbed of his money and papers and is stranded. When he helps her bury her dogs, which her neighbour has poisoned for barking, their relationship grows to a new level.
An experienced truck-driver is forced to become assistant to a young Sicilian driver. The Beast, the truck they drive around Europe, becomes their ground for mutual respect and trust.
Somewhere in rural France, a young English female tourist is sexually assaulted by two men in the countryside. After she manages to escape, a party of local hunters agree to track her in order to cover up the scandal.
Forty-year-old Sandro is married to Claude. Sandro has one strange obsession: he is a self-confessed voyeur. He films his wife in all walks of life on his wobbly hand held camcorder. But everything changes when Mark enters their life.
An important drug lord settled in Marseille is suspected of having ordered the killing of an American agent, but it is impossible to impute him due to his political influences, so the dead agent's boss decides to hire the services of a hitman to kill him.
A professor and his wife suffer humiliation at the hands of an invading college dissidents protest.
France and Germany are at war. Adolf Hitler challenges the Allies to seal the fate of the war by playing a football match.
A band of gangsters devise a plan to steal a game contested between two drug gangs of drug traffickers: the five fraudsters will face bigger problems than them.
Discovering her boyfriend is married, a young lady attempts to take her life, pausing only to phone a Help Line. Finding herself very much alive in hospital she meets the priest who took the call and, much taken with him, she starts trying to date him. He in turn succumbs to her charms and they soon realise their major problem is his Holy vow of celibacy.
Colinot's world is turned upside down when his fiancee is kidnapped.
A dedicated layabout (Jean-Pierre Cassel) bounces from relationship to relationship, moving on only when the prospect of employment presents itself.