Metropolis

Fritz Lang's staggering vision of a future city divided between pampered elites in gleaming skyscrapers and exhausted workers toiling in underground factories remains the most influential work of science fiction cinema ever produced. The scope is almost incomprehensible for 1927 — vast cityscapes created through pioneering miniature work and the Schüfftan process, a cast of thousands, and the creation of a robot double so iconic it influenced everything from C-3PO to Beyoncé. The story — a young man from the ruling class discovers the suffering below and a prophet who might unite the two worlds — is grand, operatic, and occasionally overwrought. But Lang's images are so powerful, so relentlessly inventive, that they have embedded themselves permanently in our visual imagination. Every dystopian city on screen descends from this one.