A humble scientist from Padua proves that the Earth revolves and that it is not the center of the universe.

Days before the general election, after a girl from a rich family is murdered in an attempted rape, the editor-in-chief of a conservative tabloid tries to derail the police investigation in order to help the right-wing candidates supported by his bosses.

Normandy 1850. A stagecoach drives along a road in the middle of the countryside. Inside, the passengers are all asleep except two men who are talking. Suddenly the coach stops: an axle has just broken. When one of the two men leans out of the window to see what is going on, his gaze lingers on the front a provincial abode, which seems to upset him. He soon starts remembering facts that took place forty years earlier...

Two narrators, one seen and one unseen, discuss possible connections between a series of paintings. The on-screen narrator walks through three-dimensional reproductions of each painting, featuring real people, sometimes moving, in an effort to explain the series' significance.

As an Iranian prince is killed just before signing a deal giving mining rights to an uranium mine to the USA the CIA, fearing that the same will happen to his heiress, princess Sania, tasks agent Tom Dollar with the mission of discovering who's behind it.

At the beginning of the 1913 Mexican Revolution, greedy bandit Juan Miranda and idealist John H. Mallory, an Irish Republican Army explosives expert on the lam from the British, fall in with a band of revolutionaries plotting to strike a national bank. When it turns out that the government has been using the bank as a hiding place for illegally detained political prisoners -- who are freed by the blast -- Miranda becomes a revolutionary hero against his will.

Franco and Ciccio work as waiters in an inn in France. The day Ciccio officially takes French citizenship, the First World War breaks out between Germany and France and all citizens are forced to enlist.

The story of a Antoine, a physician who was exiled to China in the 1930's due to his drug habit.

A former hero of the French anti-Nazi resistance is approached by old comrades to lead a financially struggling liberal newspaper. Initially reluctant, she takes on the challenge, mortgaging her house to keep it afloat. As conservative forces intensify their opposition, she is eventually forced to sell the paper, seeing it as a personal failure.

Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood.