Overview

Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.

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Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.

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A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

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In Fascist Albania 1942, Albanian partisans will do all they can to remove the Italian fascists from their country.

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In April of 1945, Germany stands at the brink of defeat with the Russian Army closing in from the east and the Allied Expeditionary Force attacking from the west. In Berlin, capital of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler proclaims that Germany will still achieve victory and orders his generals and advisers to fight to the last man. When the end finally does come, and Hitler lies dead by his own hand, what is left of his military must find a way to end the killing that is the Battle of Berlin, and lay down their arms in surrender.

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The lives of Erik Lanshof and five of his closest friends take different paths when the German army invades the Netherlands in 1940: fight and resistance, fear and resignation, collaboration and high treason.

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Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.

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A renowned New York playwright is enticed to California to write for the movies and discovers the hellish truth of Hollywood.

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Year 1943. A group of soldiers, carrying an injured comrade, are trying to reach the hospital.

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A Polish-Jewish family comes to the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.