Metropolis

Metropolis is where science fiction cinema begins. Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece envisioned a stratified city of the future — gleaming skyscrapers above, slave-labor factories below — and created visual iconography that every subsequent sci-fi film has borrowed from. The robot Maria, the underground machine rooms, the expressionist architecture — all of it was invented here, nearly a century ago, and none of it has been surpassed for sheer visual audacity.

The film's class allegory — workers toil underground to power the luxury of the elite above — is as relevant now as it was in Weimar Germany. Brigitte Helm's dual performance as the saintly Maria and her seductive robot doppelganger is extraordinary. The transformation scene, where the robot takes on Maria's face, is the most influential effects sequence in pre-digital cinema. Lang's vision was so far ahead of its time that Metropolis has been recut, censored, lost, and rediscovered for a century. The 2010 restoration, incorporating footage found in Buenos Aires, is the closest we have to Lang's original vision.