Sam and Silvy are best friends. One night, as they are watching a falling star while floating on their backs in a lake, Sylvy disappears from his side. Despite his best efforts, he cannot find her under water. Many years later, Sam, now a psychologist, returns to bury his father. Back in his hometown, he meets a woman called Ruby who reminds him in so many ways of his lost love.
A saga of class relations and changing times in an Edwardian England on the brink of modernity, the film centers on liberal Margaret Schlegel, who, along with her sister Helen, becomes involved with two couples: wealthy, conservative industrialist Henry Wilcox and his wife Ruth, and the downwardly mobile working-class Leonard Bast and his mistress Jackie.
After saving each other from jumping off a bridge, Henry Bell and Karen Knightly plot to avenge the people who drove them to suicide. Henry will ruin the life of the woman who married Karen's boyfriend, while Karen will work as a secretary for the man who took Henry's job. Whether revenge will be sweet – or bittersweet – is anyone's guess.
A dreamer who aspires to human flight is assigned public service after one of his attempts off a public building. This leads him to meeting a young woman, who is dying of motor neuron disease. The strong-willed woman admits her wish to be de-flowered before her death. The man, struggling to maintain his relationship with his girl friend, declines but offers to help pay for a gigolo to do the deed. The following events play off the inherent comedy and drama of the circumstances.
Gordon Comstock is a copywriter at an ad agency, and his girlfriend Rosemary is a designer. Gordon believes he is a genius, a marvelous poet and quits the ad agency, trying to live on his poems, but poverty soon comes to him.
Kate is secretly betrothed to a struggling journalist, Merton Densher. But she knows her Aunt Maude will never approve of the match, since Kate's deceased mother has lost all her money in a marriage to a degenerate opium addict. When Kate meets a terminally ill American heiress named Millie traveling through Europe, she comes up with a conniving plan to have both love and wealth.
Shakespeare's comedy of gender confusion, in which a girl disguises herself as a man to be near the count she adores, only to be pursued by the woman he loves.
Reunited at a wedding after many years, former lovers again feel the pull of a mutual attraction neither is willing to admit. Escaping the reception for the privacy of a hotel room, the unnamed pair explore the choices of the past that led them to the present.
Drama set in 1930s London with two sisters, Madeleine married to Rickie, and Dinah, who falls in love with him. Rickie and Dinah begin an affair which is to have repercussions throughout all their lives.
The death of King Henry VIII throws his kingdom into chaos because of succession disputes. His weak son Edward, is on his deathbed. Anxious to keep England true to the Reformation, a scheming minister John Dudley marries off his son, Guildford to Lady Jane Grey, whom he places on the throne after Edward dies. At first hostile to each other, Guildford and Jane fall in love. But they cannot withstand the course of power which will lead to their ultimate downfall.
When Lucy Honeychurch and chaperon Charlotte Bartlett find themselves in Florence with rooms without views, fellow guests Mr Emerson and son George step in to remedy the situation. Meeting the Emersons could change Lucy's life forever but, once back in England, how will her experiences in Tuscany affect her marriage plans?
Max is a handsome young man who, after a fateful tryst with a German soldier, is forced to run for his life. Eventually Max is placed in a concentration camp where he pretends to be Jewish because in the eyes of the Nazis, gays are the lowest form of human being. But it takes a relationship with an openly gay prisoner to teach Max that without the love of another, life is not worth living.