Oscar Winner: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration

Among the finest Western-made movies about the East, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic traces the emergence of modern China through the life of one man. After taking on Italian history in The Conformist and 1900, the director was well placed to tackle the story of Pu Yi (played by John Lone as an adult). The narrative proceeds along two tracks: the emperor's post-Forbidden City existence and his cloistered upbringing. Educated by Scotland's Reginald Johnston (Peter O'Toole, in a role slated for Sean Connery), the monarch develops into a sophisticated, if powerless figure.

2001: A Space Odyssey took the world on a mind-bending trip to outer space, but Fantastic Voyage is the original psychedelic inner-space adventure. When a brilliant scientist falls into a coma with an inoperable blood clot in the brain, a surgical team embarks on a top-secret journey to the center of the mind in a high-tech military submarine shrunk to microbial dimensions.

Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, Jorge Luis Borges, and Guillermo del Toro's own unlimited imagination, Pan's Labyrinth is a fairytale for adults. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) may only be 12, but the worlds she inhabits, both above and below ground, are dark as anything del Toro has conjured. Set in rural Spain, circa 1944, Ofelia and her widowed mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil, Belle Epoque), have just moved into an abandoned mill with Carmen's new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi LÛpez, With a Friend like Harry). Carmen is pregnant with his son.

One of the greatest screen biographies ever produced, this monumental film runs nearly three hours, won seven Academy Awards, and gave George C. Scott the greatest role of his career. It was released in 1970 when protest against the Vietnam War still raged at home and abroad, and many critics and moviegoers struggled to reconcile current events with the movie's glorification of Gen. George S. Patton as a crazy-brave genius of World War II. How could a movie so huge in scope and so fascinated by its subject be considered an anti-war film?

The director of Chicago, Rob Marshall, transports us into a mysterious and exotic world that casts a potent spell. A Cinderella story like no other, Memoirs Of A Geisha stars Zhang Ziyi, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li. "Gorgeously photographed, meticulously directed andihypnotically acted. Memoirs of A Geisha isiluxurious, ethereal andiintoxicating. It will leave you breathless." (Rex Reed, New York Observer)

Based on a novel by James Michener, Sayonara earned a fistful of OscarÆ nominations (including Best Picture, Director, and Actor) in 1957 and wound up winning statuettes for supporting actors Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki. Marlon Brando plays a Korean War fighter pilot, the son of a general, reassigned to Japan, where fraternization with local women is taboo. After breaking off his engagement to another general's daughter, he finds himself falling for a Japanese entertainer (Miiko Taka), then struggling with his own bias.

From Hollywood's legendary Cocoanut Grove to the pioneering conquest of the wild blue yonder, Martin Scorsese's The Aviator celebrates old-school filmmaking at its finest. We say "old school" only because Scorsese's love of golden-age Hollywood is evident in his approach to his subject--Howard Hughes in his prime (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in his)--and especially in his technical mastery of the medium reflecting his love for classical filmmaking of the studio era.

David Lean focused all his talent as an epic-maker on Boris Pasternak's sweeping novel about a doctor-poet in revolutionary Russia. The results may sometimes veer toward soap opera, especially with the screen frequently filled with adoring close-ups of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, but Lean's gift for cramming the screen with spectacle is not to be denied. The streets of Moscow, the snowy steppes of Russia, the house in the country taken over by ice; these are re-created with Lean's unerring sense of grandness.

Stanley Kubrick was only 31 years old when Kirk Douglas (star of Kubrick's classic Paths of Glory) recruited the young director to pilot this epic saga, in which the rebellious slave Spartacus (played by Douglas) leads a freedom revolt against the decadent Roman Empire. Kubrick would later disown the film because it was not a personal project--he was merely a director-for-hire--but Spartacus remains one of the best of Hollywood's grand historical epics.

Sir Richard Attenborough's 1982 multiple-Oscar winner (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Ben Kingsley) is an engrossing, reverential look at the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who introduced the doctrine of nonviolent resistance to the colonized people of India and who ultimately gained the nation its independence. Kingsley is magnificent as Gandhi as he changes over the course of the three-hour film from an insignificant lawyer to an international leader and symbol.