Mexican beauty Camilla hopes to rise above her station by marrying a wealthy American. That is complicated by meeting Arturo Bandini, a first-generation Italian hoping to land a writing career and a blue-eyed blonde on his arm.

Ari Ben Canaan, a passionate member of the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah, attempts to transport 600 Jewish refugees on a dangerous voyage from Cyprus to Palestine on a ship named the Exodus. He faces obstruction from British forces, who will not grant the ship passage to its destination.

Lorenzo Odone, a Virginia 5-year-old, develops a degenerative nerve disease so rare that nobody is working on a cure, so his parents decide to immerse themselves in research and tackle the problem themselves.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French fashion bible Elle magazine, has a devastating stroke at age 43. The damage to his brain stem results in locked-in syndrome, with which he is almost completely paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking an eye. Bauby painstakingly dictates his memoir via the only means of expression left to him.

While doing a friend a favor and searching for a runaway teenager, a police detective stumbles upon a bizarre band of criminals about to pull off a bank robbery.

After proving himself on the field of battle in the French and Indian War, Benjamin Martin wants nothing more to do with such things, preferring the simple life of a farmer. But when his son Gabriel enlists in the army to defend their new nation, America, against the British, Benjamin reluctantly returns to his old life to protect his son.

On his first day on the job as a narcotics officer, a rookie cop works with a rogue detective who isn't what he appears.

Jason, an American lawyer, poses as a john to build a legal case against a pimp trafficking girls to Bangkok. Can he win the trust of a young prostitute known only as Number 18 and convince her to risk her life to testify against her pimp?

In 1990 Chicago, a taxi driver recounts to his passenger, a sportswriter, his life story. He reveals himself to be Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, one of the first African Americans to play in the NBA.

Two intertwined families, one American, one Mexican, and their fight to save three year old illegal Angelina from deportation.

In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.

Schoolteacher Bertram Cates is arrested for teaching his students Darwin's theory of evolution. The case receives national attention and one of the newspaper reporters, E.K. Hornbeck, arranges to bring in renowned defense attorney and atheist Henry Drummond to defend Cates. The prosecutor, Matthew Brady is a former presidential candidate, famous evangelist, and old adversary of Drummond.