Watch Lang’s Metropolis in 2026 and the shock isn't nitrate. The shock is how much downtown is still trying to become that set. Fritz Lang’s picture premiered in 1927. Universum Film. A two-hour-plus silent, depending on the restoration, about a vertical city that runs on a machine and a woman who is also a robot. Maria, Freder, Rotwang, the Moloch sequence: those are the names. The city is the star.

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