In an age of Gladiators, the power that was Rome held its empire together with the might of its armies, the sweat and tears of its conquests, and the cheers and bloodlust of its citizens – glorified in the deadly spectacle of The Arena. Stolen from their homelands, the fiery Druid maiden Bodicia, exotic slave girl Jessemina, and the powerful barbarian Flavius, are pitted against each other as gladiators by the sadistic Roman Governor Timarchus. Banished by Caesar, Timarchus unleashes his frustration on his gladiators, staging extravagant spectacles of combat, orgy and death. In a violent world where only the strong survive, love and hate, life and death, are separated by an instant.

Russia, early 90s. A fictional story inspired by financier Sergey Mavrodi, his securities company "MMM", and the pyramid scheme he ran that left upwards of fifteen million investors with nothing when it crashed.

Anatoli Novoseltsev works in a ratings company, whose director is an unattractive and bossy woman. An old friend of his, Yuri Samokhvalov, who gets appointed assistant director, wants to make Novoseltsev the manager but encounters objections from Ludmila Kalugina, the director. Samokhvalov then advises Novoseltsev to lightly hit on the boss. Ironically, Novoseltsev and Kalugina fall in love with each other.

Three Russian friends work in New York, party hard and chase women. It's great times until they get cursed by a drunken Russian night club owner, who turns out to be Saint Valentine. St. Valentine's curse is simple - the guys lose all their manly powers until they find their true love. It turns out to be harder than it sounds - our boys have a lot of growing up to do. Fast.

Two Moscow students are mostly concerned with scoring with women but their lives change radically when one of them falls for a Jewish girl whose family is being persecuted by anonymous anti-Semites and is preparing to emigrate to Israel.

Two young friends psychiatrists perceive life differently. One desires to act by the rules. The other one prefers experimenting. One is a hard worker while the second one likes to break the silence. One loves with hate, the other one hates with love. It's a pity they both have one passion - Katherina Sergeevna. To one she is a loving mother, father's wife. To the other - a lover.

In Los Angeles, Dr. Sarah Hathaway hired private eyes trying to find her missing son, the painter Thomas, who ran away from their home ten years ago after a quarrel with her. She finds a clue in a catalog of a panting exhibition in San Petersburg and she decides to travel alone to Russia to search for Thomas. Once there, she is not able to locate him and she has a nervous breakdown, but with the support of Dr. Ivan and helped by a street boy, she discloses what happened with her son.

This is an interesting yet bizarre little tale of a fictional (as far as I know, anyway) experiment performed during the Stalin-controlled years in the USSR. The main character is changed from a woman into a man. This is part of a larger plan to change more women into men and have a stronger work-force/army, etc. It's a very in-depth character study of the main character, who tries to fit into a world that she (now 'he') doesn't really understand, especially since she's now a man ... Stalin dislikes the results of the experiments and has the scientist killed. The main character then goes off to live a life as a simple, unknown everyday Soviet, but is inexplicably drawn into larger and larger schemes (somewhat reminiscent of "Forrest Gump" in that way). (s)He has run-ins with different important characters, including his ex-boyfriend from his days of being a woman, as well as going on a demented quest for the nurse with whom he possibly fell in love after the operation... However, he is trapped in his life as an important Soviet married man, and in the end makes a huge sacrifice for his country (unwillingly), and the movie goes from there to an ending that is possibly happy, yet still somehow incredibly depressing.