Metropolis

Fritz Lang's Metropolis opened in Berlin in January 1927, at over two and a half hours and the highest production budget then committed to a single German film. The studio butchered it for international release; the original cut was considered lost for eighty years until a near-complete print was discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008, allowing the 2010 restoration that is now the definitive version. UNESCO inscribed the film on its Memory of the World register in 2001.

In a 21st-century city of skyscrapers, a privileged elite live above ground and a vast workforce toils below. Freder, son of the city's master, descends to the depths and discovers the conditions of the workers; meanwhile the inventor Rotwang creates a robot in the image of the worker-leader Maria, and a revolt is engineered. Brigitte Helm plays both the saintly Maria and her metallic doppelgänger; Karl Freund and Günther Rittau's photography produced the images of the city, the M-Maschine, and the false Maria's transformation that have shaped a century of science-fiction iconography.

Critics including H. G. Wells dismissed the film on first release as politically incoherent, its head, hands and heart moral was widely (and not unfairly) read as a soft-fascist consolation. But the film's images are so prodigious that they outlived the politics: every dystopian science-fiction film from Blade Runner to The Fifth Element traces back to Metropolis.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The visual foundation of all subsequent science fiction, and the apex of Weimar Expressionism. The 2010 restoration finally allowed an audience to see the film Lang made, not the one his distributors mutilated.