Oscar Nominee: Best Foreign Language Film

This fact-based epic traces the early and tumultuous years of legendary warrior Genghis Khan, then known as Temudgin (Tadanobu Asano). Despite the killing of his father, the betrayal of his friend, and even being forced to serve as a slave, Temudgin still creates his own path for future greatness. He hones his battle skills and marries Borte (Khulan Chuluun), whose love and reliability are crucial, often overlooked elements to his historic success as a conqueror.

Champaner… a small farming village in central India. The year is 1893. On the outskirts of the village stands a British cantonment, commanded by Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne) – An arrogant and capricious man, who wields the power of life and death over the villages under his jurisdiction. When the villagers are unable to pay the crippling land tax imposed on them by their British rulers due to draught and famine, Captain Russell offers them a challenge. To assemble a team and face the British soldiers in a game of cricket, a game they have never heard of.

This 1993 international hit by Ang Lee is a funny and poignant story of a gay, Taiwanese-American man who goes to some lengths to fool his visiting family that he's actually straight. The results are far more complicated and entertaining than anyone could have guessed. The film seems all the more rich now since Lee has become a major Hollywood director: that same sensitivity and mild bemusement he brought to such stories of manners as Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm in recent years are in full bloom in this earlier work.

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.

This is not a movie to see on an empty stomach. Writer-director Ang Lee's 1994 Oscar nominee tells a family story about a chef and his three daughters through the meals the chef prepares and serves his family. This touching, dryly funny story of a family coping with personal lives and the way those lives intersect with the family relationships captures a shift in generations in Taipei. The father, a famous chef who has lost his taste buds, still cooks, though he draws no pleasure from eating.

The 1970s were difficult years for the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Following the box-office failure of his 1970 film Dodes'ka-den and an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Kurosawa was unable to find financial backing in Japan, and he made his acclaimed 1975 film Dersu Uzala in Siberia with Russian financing.

Director Zhang Yimou brings the sumptuous visual style of his previous films (Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad) to the high-kicking kung fu genre. A nameless warrior (Jet Li, Romeo Must Die, Once Upon a Time in China) arrives at an emperor's palace with three weapons, each belonging to a famous assassin who had sworn to kill the emperor. As the nameless man spins out his story--and the emperor presents his own interpretation of what might really have happened--each episode is drenched in red, blue, white or another dominant color.

Amelie, a shy waitress in a cafe in central Paris, is looking for love, and perhaps for the meaning of life in general. When she finds a box of childhood toys in her apartment, it inspires her to conduct a series of good deeds for her co-workers and neighbors. In doing so, she gradually finds the route to happiness by coming out of her shell and reaching out to others.