During the Second World War, Eric Lomax is a British officer who is captured by the Japanese in Singapore and sent to a Japanese POW camp, where he is forced to work on the Thai- Burma Railway north of the Malay Peninsula. During his time in the camp as one of the Far East prisoners of war, Lomax is tortured by the Kempeitai (military secret police) for building a radio receiver from spare parts. The torture depicted includes beatings, food deprivation and waterboarding. Apparently, he had fallen under suspicion of being a spy, for supposedly using the British news broadcast receiver as a transmitter of military intelligence. In fact, however, his only intention had been to use the device as a morale booster for himself and his fellow prisoner-slaves. Lomax and his surviving comrades are finally rescued by the British Army. Thirty years later, Lomax is still suffering the psychological trauma of his wartime experiences, though strongly supported by his wife, Patricia, whom he had met on one of his many train excursions, a true railway enthusiast. His best friend and fellow ex-POW Finlay brings him evidence that one of their captors, an interpreter for the Japanese secret police Takashi Nagase, is now working as a tourist guide in the very camp where he interpreted for the Kempetai as they tortured British POWs. Before Lomax can act on this information, Finlay, unable to handle his memories of his experiences, commits suicide by hanging himself from a bridge. Lomax travels alone to Thailand and returns to the scene of his torture to confront Nagase “in an attempt to let go of a lifetime of bitterness and hate”. When he finally confronts his former captor, Lomax first questions him in the same way Nagase and his men had interrogated him years before. The situation builds up to the point where Lomax prepares to smash Nagase's arm, using a club and a clamp designed by the Japanese for that purpose and now used as war exhibits. Out of guilt, Nagase does not resist, but Lomax redirects the blow at the last moment. Lomax threatens to cut Nagase's throat and finally pushes him into a bamboo cage, of the kind in which Lomax and many other POWs had been placed as punishment. Nagase soon reveals that the Japanese (including himself) were brainwashed into thinking the war would be a victorious one for them, and that he never knew about the high casualties caused by the Imperial Japanese Army. Lomax finally frees Nagase, throws his knife into the nearby river and returns to Britain. After receiving a heartfelt letter from Nagase confessing his feelings of guilt, Lomax returns, with Patricia, to Thailand. He meets Nagase once again, and in an emotional scene the two accept each other's apologies and embrace. The epilogue relates that Nagase and Eric remained friends until Nagase's death in 2011 and Eric's one year later.

In Northampton, in the East Midlands of England, Charlie Price is attempting to save his family's shoe factory, which has been floundering since his father's death. While on a business trip to London to sell the company's extra stock, Charlie encounters a woman being harassed by drunken hoodlums and intervenes to his detriment. He wakes up backstage, in the dressing room of Lola, a drag queen performer and alter ego of Simon. Charlie is intrigued when he sees that drag queens' high heels snap easily, and wishes to create high heels that can support a greater range of foot sizes and body types. Back in Northampton, while in the process of laying off workers, one of them, Lauren, gives Charlie the idea of looking for a niche market product to save the business. Charlie then recruits Lauren to assist him in designing a high-heeled boot for drag performers. When their initial designs are met with scorn by Lola, Charlie and Lauren bring her on as a consultant. The road is initially bumpy: many of the male employees are uncomfortable with Lola's presence and the new direction, and Charlie's relationship with his fiancée, Nicola, begins to deteriorate as she encourages him to sell the factory building to a developer. Although things improve when Lola tones down her personality and starts making friends, matters take a turn for the worse when Charlie is invited to showcase the new boots in Milan; the strain he puts on his employees causes most of them, including Lola, to walk out. Charlie's fiancée arrives at the factory, furious that he took out a second mortgage on their house to save the company. Nicola insists that he sell the company, but Charlie is determined to save it and the jobs of his employees. The argument (which ends with Nicola leaving Charlie) is broadcast on the factory's PA system, which is overheard by Lauren and Lola's bitter opponent at the factory, Don, a chauvinistic male worker. Don changes his mindset after Lola graciously allowed him to win an arm wrestling match. Don rallies the factory workers to make the boots in time for Charlie and Lauren to get to Milan. When Charlie catches Nicola with another man, he angrily takes out his frustrations on Lola, causing Lola to quit. After arriving in Milan with no one to model the boots, Charlie is forced to go onstage and model the boots himself. After he trips and ultimately falls flat on his face, Lola and her posse of drag queens arrive, put on a spectacular runway show, and save the day. In the film's denouement, Lola headlines her own show and sings a song in honour of the "kinky boots factory" of Northampton. Most of the key workers are in attendance and enjoying themselves, including Charlie and Lauren, who have become a couple.

Based on a true story, Made in Dagenham explores the movement that caused a significant law reform. Rita O'Grady (a fictional character) leads the 1968 Ford sewing machinists strike at the Ford Dagenham plant, where female workers walk out to protest against sexual discrimination, demanding equal pay. The strike drew major attention around the world because it was considered contrary to women's traditional family roles. The successful strike led to the Equal Pay Act 1970.

In 1987, Carol White is a housewife living in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles with her husband Greg and stepson Rory. She spends her days gardening, doing aerobics, and meeting friends. Her marriage and family life appear stable but sterile, and her friends are polite but distant. After the family's home is renovated, Carol begins experiencing physical symptoms in everyday situations: She coughs uncontrollably when exposed to exhaust fumes from a nearby truck while driving, suffers a panic attack at a baby shower, and has a nosebleed while getting a perm at a hair salon. As her symptoms worsen, she becomes convinced that they are triggered by exposure to chemicals. Finally, she collapses while at her dry cleaners, which is being fumigated with pesticides. Doctors are unable to diagnose or treat Carol and state that she is physically healthy. She attends psychotherapy sessions, but her symptoms do not improve. She finds herself very alone with her condition, as her community remains indifferent to her suffering. While hospitalized, Carol watches an advertisement for Wrenwood, a new-age desert community for people with " environmental illnesses." The commune is led by Peter Dunning, an author who encourages residents to use self-help techniques. Realizing that she can no longer function in her current life, she leaves everything behind and moves to Wrenwood. Even in a community of people who are friendly towards her and suffer from similar health problems, Carol becomes increasingly isolated despite claiming that she is getting better. Lesions appear on her face and she increasingly relies on an oxygen tank. Eventually, she moves into an insulated dome separated from the rest of the community. There, as a "treatment" suggested by others in the commune, she looks into a mirror and repeats, "I love you" to herself.

The film spans 30 years of Chicano gang life in Los Angeles. The story opens with the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 and depicts a young Latino couple, Esperanza and Pedro Santana, being racially targeted by sailors. Pedro is beaten alongside other Latin-Americans, while Esperanza is gang-raped by the sailors. Years later, in 1959, the Santana family's teenaged son, Montoya, forms a street gang called La Primera along with his friends J.D. and Mundo. The three friends soon find themselves committing crimes and are therefore arrested. In juvenile hall, Santana murders a fellow inmate who raped him. As a result, his sentence is extended, and he is moved to Folsom State Prison after he turns 18. Years later, Santana has become the leader of a powerful prison gang, La Eme. Upon his release from prison in 1977, he tries to relate his life experiences to the society that has changed so much since he was incarcerated. La Eme has become a feared criminal organization beyond Folsom, selling drugs and committing murder. Santana begins a romantic relationship with a woman named Julie, but she becomes repulsed by his violent tendencies and by La Eme's negative influence on their community. After a drug lord refuses to give control of distribution to La Eme, La Eme retaliates by brutally raping and murdering the drug lord's son in prison. In response, the drug lord targets Santana's community by distributing pure heroin to local users. The pure heroin causes mass overdoses, and one of the overdose victims is Julie's brother. Santana visits his mother's grave, where his father reveals that he always resented Montoya because he might have been the son of his mother's rapist. Santana starts to see the error of his ways. Before he can take action, however, he is sent back to Folsom for drug possession. When J.D. visits, Santana tells him that he is no longer interested in leading La Eme. However, following a precedent set by Santana himself earlier in the film, his men—including Mundo—murder him to show the other prison gangs that La Eme is not weak and will not tolerate departures from its ranks. Santana is fatally stabbed and thrown off a balcony to his death. Julie receives a letter from Santana thanking her for opening his eyes. The letter contains his necklace of St. Dismas. Julie gives the necklace to Santana's teen brother Paulito, who then inducts a young boy into the street gang, La Primera by having him commit a drive-by shooting.

In the rural Ozarks of Missouri, seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly looks after her mentally ill mother, Connie, twelve-year-old brother Sonny, and six-year-old sister Ashlee. She makes sure her siblings eat and teaches them survival skills such as hunting and cooking. The family is destitute. Ree's father, Jessup, has not been home for a long time; his whereabouts are unknown. He is out on bail following an arrest for manufacturing meth. Sheriff Baskin tells Ree that if her father does not appear for his court date, they will lose the house because it was put up as part of his bond. Ree sets out to find her father. She starts with her meth-addicted uncle Teardrop and continues to more distant kin, eventually trying to talk to the local crime boss, Thump Milton. Milton refuses to see her; the only information Ree comes up with are warnings to leave the situation alone and stories that Jessup died in a meth lab fire or skipped town to avoid the trial. When Jessup fails to appear for the trial, the bondsman comes looking for him and tells Ree that she has about a week before the house and land are seized. Ree tells him that Jessup must be dead, because "Dollys don't run". He tells her that she must provide proof that her father is dead to avoid the bond being forfeited. Ree tries to go see Milton again and is severely beaten by the women of his family. Teardrop rescues Ree, promising her attackers that she will not cause more trouble. Teardrop tells Ree that her father was killed because he was going to inform on other meth cookers, but he does not know who killed him. He warns her that if she finds out who did, she must not tell him because he will seek revenge. Ree is driven home by Teardrop, where her injuries are taken care of by Gail and other women of Rathlin Valley. Later, Ree talks to an Army recruiter about enlisting for the $40,000 bonus, but he tells her that she needs her parents' signatures to enlist and that she is trying to enlist for the wrong reasons. On the way home from a bar and, after antagonising some of Thump's henchmen, Ree and her uncle are pulled over by the sheriff, who wants to question Teardrop. After a tense standoff, where Teardrop implies that he knows the Sheriff leaked that Jessup was an informer, Teardrop drives off. A few nights later, the Milton women who beat Ree come to her house and offer to take her to " daddy's bones". The women place a sack on her head and drive her to a pond, where they row to the shallow area where her father's submerged body lies. They tell Ree to reach into the water and grasp her father's hands so they can cut them off with a chainsaw; the severed hands will serve as proof of death for the authorities. Ree takes the hands to the sheriff, telling him that someone flung them onto the porch of her house. The bondsman gives Ree the cash portion of the bond, which was put up by an anonymous associate of Jessup. Ree tries to give Jessup's banjo to Teardrop, but he tells her to keep it at the house for him. As he is leaving, he tells her that he now knows who killed her father. Ree reassures Sonny and Ashlee that she will never leave them. As the three sit on the porch, Ashlee begins to play their father's banjo.

Guy Hamilton, a novice foreign correspondent for an Australian radio network, arrives in Jakarta on assignment. He meets the close-knit members of the foreign correspondent community, including journalists from the UK, the US, and New Zealand; diplomatic personnel; and Billy Kwan, a photo-journalist and outlier in the journalist community. A Chinese-Australian man with dwarfism, high intelligence, and moral seriousness, Kwan is deeply involved with and concerned for the people of Jakarta and their tribulations, even regularly providing for a destitute woman and her young son. Guy is initially unsuccessful as a journalist because his predecessor, tired of life in Indonesia, had departed without introducing Guy to his contacts. He receives limited sympathy from the journalist community, which competes for scraps of information from Sukarno 's regime, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), and the conservative, Muslim-dominated Indonesian military. However, Billy takes a liking to Guy and arranges interviews for him with key political figures. Billy introduces Guy to Jill Bryant, a beautiful young assistant at the British Embassy. Billy and Jill are close friends, yet Billy subtly manipulates her encounters with Guy. Since she is returning to the UK shortly, Jill initially resists Guy's attentions, but eventually they fall in love. When Jill discovers that the Chinese communists are arming the PKI in preparation for civil war, she passes this information to Guy, informing him that all foreigners will be in danger. She advises him to leave the country, but he uses the information to write about the communist rebellion that will occur when the arms shipment reaches Jakarta. Upset with Guy's lack of discretion and concerned it will lead back to Jill as the informant, Billy and Jill cut off contact with Guy; he is left with the American journalist Pete Curtis and his own assistant and driver Kumar, who is secretly a member of the PKI. Kumar, however, remains loyal to Guy, and tries to open his eyes to all that is going on. After the boy Billy had been caring for becomes ill and dies, Billy becomes despondent and disillusioned over Sukarno's failure to meet the needs of the Indonesian people. He hangs a banner with "Sukarno feed your people" from the Hotel Indonesia to express his outrage, but he is thrown from the window by security men and dies in Guy's arms. His death is also witnessed by Jill. Still pursuing his civil war scoop, Guy attempts to access the presidential palace where, having learned of the communist shipment, the army generals have taken over and unleashed executions. Struck down by an army officer, Guy suffers a serious eye injury. Resting alone in Billy's bungalow, Guy recalls a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, "all is clouded by desire", which Billy had recited to him. Kumar visits him and tells him about the failed coup attempt. Risking permanent damage to his eye, a bandaged Guy implores Kumar to drive him to the airport, where he boards the last plane out of Jakarta and is reunited with Jill.

The young revolutionary and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela is arrested, and it is the task of censor and prison guard James Gregory to watch him. He has long since moved to South Africa with the family for his work in the prison of Robben Island, and slowly he clashes with the politics and racist culture of his countrymen.

The film begins with a continuing series of flashbacks into the childhood of Daniel Balint, a young Jewish yeshiva student. Brilliant but troubled, he often challenged his teachers with unorthodox interpretations of scripture. During a debate about the Binding of Isaac, Daniel argues that the story was not about Abraham 's faith but God's power: that God's purpose was not to have Abraham accomplish a particular task, but rather to demand unquestioning obedience; harshly depicting God as a bully. It is from these early experiences that Daniel begins to defect from his Jewish identity. In the present day, Daniel is now a fanatically violent neo-Nazi in New York in his early twenties. Daniel and his group of skinhead friends find a meeting of fascists run by Curtis Zampf and Lina Moebius, where he also makes a connection with Lina's daughter Carla. Daniel advocates killing Jews, and a banker named Manzetti in particular, but Curtis and Lina oppose harming Jews on practical if not moral grounds. Impressed with Daniel's intelligence and oratory, Lina invites him to their camp retreat in the country. Afterward, Daniel and his neo-Nazi friends pick a fight with two African-American men, get arrested, and are bailed out by Carla. He spends the night with her but returns to his ailing father's home where he is harangued by his sister Linda for his Nazi beliefs, but she also urges him to stay and have Shabbat dinner. The men watch TV, which is forbidden on the Sabbath according to some Orthodox Jews, leading them to commiserate on the incomprehensibility of Jewish law. Guy Danielsen, a journalist writing an article on hate groups, meets Daniel for an interview. He listens to Daniel's antisemitic speech, but then reveals that he knows Daniel is Jewish from tracking down his old rabbi and bar mitzvah record. Enraged by this, Daniel pulls out a pistol and threatens to commit suicide if Guy publishes the truth. Daniel goes to the fascist camp retreat, where he meets Drake, a skilled marksman, along with an explosives expert. Six of the retreat participants, including Daniel, go to a Jewish deli, where they torment the owner about Jewish dietary laws until a fight breaks out. Daniel and his friends are required by a court to take sensitivity training, where they listen to the experiences of Holocaust survivors. One talks about how his infant son was murdered by a Nazi. Daniel is enraged that the man did nothing to save his son, but all the survivors assert that Daniel would also have done nothing, and he walks out in anger. The story haunts him, and he imagines himself as the Nazi. Later that night, Daniel and the gang break into a synagogue, vandalize it, and plant a time bomb under the pulpit. They also tear, trample, and spit on a Torah scroll, though Daniel protests. After they leave, Daniel takes the scroll and a tallit katan with him. The next morning, the neo-Nazis hear on the news that the bomb failed to go off. Back in his cabin, Daniel puts on the tallit under his shirt and performs a combination of the Nazi salute and a Hagbaha. Drake approaches him with a plan to kill Manzetti. Outside a temple, Daniel fires at him but misses. Drake discovers the tallit and realizes that he is a Jew, so Daniel shoots him and escapes. He continues to meet with Lina and Curtis, who want to start an above-ground movement to bring fascism into the political mainstream, inviting Jews, blacks, and liberals. Daniel reluctantly agrees to help them raise funds. At the meetings that follow, Daniel first charms, then enrages, their potential donors with his intellectual games, leading to his expulsion. When news breaks that Manzetti was killed, Lina suspects Daniel, since he proposed the assassination, but Drake is the real killer. Carla comforts Daniel and they sleep together at his home. When she sees the stolen Torah, she asks Daniel to teach her Hebrew. He soon runs into an old friend and his fiancée, Stuart and Miriam, who invite him to a Rosh Hashanah service, assuming that he is an anti-racist skinhead. When Daniel arrives, another old friend calls him out as a racist skinhead. As he is leaving, Miriam, who works for the District Attorney, tells him that half of the people in Lina's meetings are informants for the D.A. She asks Daniel to record conversations at a meeting so she can help him with possible charges stemming from the Manzetti killing, but he refuses. As Yom Kippur approaches, Daniel calls Miriam and insists on taking Stuart's place leading the Ne'ila service at the bimah on Yom Kippur. He and his friends plant a new bomb under the temple's pulpit even though they find it reinforced, limiting the explosion. When Daniel takes the pulpit the next day, he is shocked to see Carla in the congregation. He again imagines himself in the story the Holocaust survivor told him, this time as both the Nazi and the Jew. With minutes to go, Daniel stops and tells everyone to get out because there is a bomb, but refuses to leave himself. There is a flash of light, and Daniel is shown ascending the stairs in the Jewish school he left as a child. His old teacher approaches, hoping to talk about the Binding of Isaac, and suggests that Isaac died on the mountain and was reborn in the world to come. But Daniel ignores him and keeps climbing up but unexplainably meets his teacher on every floor, asking Daniel to stop, calling out, "There's nothing up there."

Seattle television journalist Lee Carter witnesses the assassination of U.S. senator and presidential aspirant Charles Carroll atop the Space Needle during a campaign stop. The killer, disguised as a waiter, is killed during the pursuit. His presumed accomplice, also disguised as a waiter, escapes. The assassination is officially determined to have been the work of a single man acting alone. Six witnesses die over the next three years. Carter fears she will be next, and goes to ex-boyfriend Joe Frady, an investigative newspaper reporter in Oregon, for protection; he turns her away. Shortly afterwards Carter is found dead; the death is ruled to be suicide from alcohol and barbiturate overdosing. Feeling guilty about disregarding Carter's pleas and suspicious about her death, Frady investigates the drowning death of Judge Arthur Bridges - another witness - in the nearby small town of Salmontail. Wicker, the local sheriff, takes Frady to a place below a dam where Bridges died. Wicker holds Frady at gunpoint as the floodgates open, but it is Wicker who drowns. At Wicker's home, Frady discovers documents from the Parallax Corporation, an organization recruiting "security" operatives. Frady takes a Parallax personality test document from Wicker's home to a local psychology professor, Nelson Schwartzkopf. Schwartzkopf determines the test is used to identify homicidal psychopaths and gives it to a known psychopath to learn the "correct" answers. Frady meets with Austin Tucker, an aide to Carroll and another witness, on Tucker's yacht; Tucker has survived two murder attempts since the assassination. Tucker saw the real assassin and gives Frady an image of the assassin in disguise. A bomb goes off which kills Tucker while Frady is thrown into the water and presumed dead. Frady tells his editor, Bill Rintels, that he will use his official death and a pseudonym to infiltrate Parallax. Frady submits the personality test with the "correct" answers as suggested by Schwartzkopf's analysis to Parallax Corp. His perfect answers attract the attention of Parallax and a few days later, Frady is recruited for training by Parallax official Jack Younger. Frady visits Parallax's Los Angeles headquarters where he is observed for reactions to montages of disturbingly edited and subliminal still photographs and images that juxtapose pro- and anti-American attitudes. Frady spots Carroll's assassin while leaving and follows the assassin, who puts a bomb aboard an airliner in checked baggage at Hollywood Burbank Airport. Frady boards the flight, mistakenly believing the assassin to be on board, and sees another U.S. senator, Gillingham, who is also considering running for president. Frady surreptitiously warns a flight attendant. The jet returns to the airport and is evacuated before it explodes. Younger confronts Frady about the latter's alias. Frady's cover story and a second alias mollifies Younger. Later, at the newspaper office, Rintels listens to a recording of this conversation and stores it with other evidence. That evening, Rintels is killed by poisoned food delivered by the assassin, disguised as a deli delivery boy. The evidence is gone by the time Rintels' body is discovered. Frady goes to Parallax's office in Atlanta, where he has been assigned a security position. There, he follows the assassin to a rehearsal for a political rally for another presidential aspirant, Senator George Hammond. Frady chases the assassin. Hammond is killed by an unseen sniper. Frady finds the rifle on the catwalks and then is spotted by security. Frady flees, realizing he is being framed as a scapegoat, and is killed by a silhouetted figure. Six months later, another official investigation reports that Frady was a paranoid lone gunman who killed Hammond out of a misguided sense of patriotism.

In 1973 San Fernando Valley, 15-year-old actor Gary Valentine meets 25-year-old Alana Kane, a photographer's assistant, at his school picture day. She is put off by his invitation to dinner, but shows up anyway. When Gary's mother cannot chaperone him on a press tour performance in New York City, he invites Alana. He is jealous when Alana begins dating his co-star Lance, but they break up after Lance reveals he is an atheist during Shabbat dinner with her Jewish family. Gary begins selling waterbeds and reconnects with Alana at a teenage trade expo. Mistaken for a murder suspect, Gary is arrested and Alana runs after him to the police station, but he is soon released. Alana joins Gary's waterbed business, acting seductively on the phone to land a potential customer. Introducing her to his talent agent, he is upset that she is open to nudity but refuses to show him her breasts. She impulsively does so, but slaps him when he asks to touch them. They open a "Fat Bernie's" storefront for their waterbeds, and Alana is hurt when Gary flirts with his classmate Sue. Peeking in on them making out in the back room, Alana kisses a man on the street before storming off back home. Gary's agent secures an audition for Alana for a film starring veteran actor Jack Holden, who takes her to the Tail o' the Cock restaurant, where Gary and his friends are also dining. An intoxicated Alana makes Gary jealous, and Holden's friend, film director Rex Blau, convinces him to recreate one of his motorcycle stunts on a nearby golf course, bringing the entire restaurant along. Alana topples off the bike before Holden jumps over a flaming sand trap, and Gary runs to her side. Reconciled, they walk to the waterbed store, where Gary stops himself from touching a sleeping Alana's breast. The 1973 oil crisis sweeps the country, forcing the waterbed manufacturer to close. Alana, Gary, and his friends make one final delivery to the home of Jon Peters, who humiliates Gary before leaving to meet his girlfriend, Barbra Streisand. Filling up the waterbed inside, Gary intentionally leaves the hose running, with Alana's approval. They drive away but are waved down by an agitated Peters, whose car has run out of gas, and leave him at a crowded gas station when he violently commandeers a gas pump. Gary stops to smash Peters's car, but runs out of gas as well. Alana maneuvers their truck backward down a long hill to a gas station, impressing Gary, but causing her to question her recent decisions. Inspired by a campaign poster, Alana reaches out to her old classmate Brian, who brings her on as volunteer staffer for Joel Wachs, a city councilman running for mayor. Gary briefly joins her but overhears that pinball will soon be legalized in the Valley and decides to open an arcade, leading to an argument with Alana about their difference in age and their fraught relationship. Emasculating Gary to make herself feel superior, Alana offers to drive him home in an attempt to make peace, but Gary drives off alone. Later, Gary prepares for the opening night of his arcade, remodeling his storefront into "Fat Bernie's Pinball Palace." That same night, Alana nearly shares a kiss with Brian, but is interrupted by an invitation from Wachs. Thinking it is a date, she is dejected to discover Wachs wants her to pose as the girlfriend of his secret boyfriend, Matthew, to save him from political embarrassment. Alana walks a deeply hurt Matthew home, and they commiserate over the men in their lives. She goes to the arcade to find Gary, who has left to look for her at Wachs's office, with her sisters' encouragement. They eventually run to each other's arms and return to the arcade, where Gary announces her as "Mrs. Alana Valentine." Sharing a kiss, they run into the night, and Alana tells Gary that she loves him.