Moviegoers are used to experiencing magic. Sword-bearing heroes flying through the air, villains mutating into horrific monsters, portals opening into other times and dimensions are all part of a film lover’s daily experience.  But while these moments thrill and entertain, they seldom mystify. That’s because their methods – CGI, make-up effects, green-screen photography – are well known not only to professionals but to the average viewer, who has only to click to a DVD bonus feature to discover the secrets behind the illusions of cinema.

So, perhaps, it’s not so surprising that a form of theatrical magic that predates cinema is experiencing a resurgence these days. Sleight-of-hand, stage magic, and mentalism are all finding new audiences in live performance venues, on television, on the internet, and in recent magic-themed movies like The Illusionist and The Prestige. Of course, the relationship between magic and cinema is long and well established. Georges Melies, widely considered the inventor of special effects cinema, was a stage magician at Paris’s Theater Robert-Houdin, and America’s Harry Houdini was not only a special effects consultant to film but also a film producer and actor.

To explore the nexus between magic and cinema, we asked a truly astonishing group containing some of the field’s top artists to tell us the five films that have inspired their own creativity in some way. Here Aaron Fisher, Jim Steinmeyer, Homer Liwag, David Regal and Eric Mead submit five idiosyncratic lists that expand our notions of movie magic. And because productions and multiplication are hallmarks of many magic tricks, we’ve allowed two more top names, Max Maven and Roberto Giobbi, to swell this most mysterious “Five in Focus” offering. Check back for each magician to, well, magically appear.