“THE MOST IMPORTANT FILM EVENT OF THE YEAR!”
– Roger Ebert
[FIVE STARS - HIGHEST RATING]
"The revelations are indeed stunning... adding even more depth to a delirious, dreamlike class parable whose dystopia still feels exhilaratingly modern."
-- Time Out New York
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“STUNNING! AN ABSOLUTE MUST-SEE! Restored are entire sub-plots (one set in a red-light district) and elaborate cross-cutting that makes Metropolis even more resonant, not to mention easier to follow.”
– Lou Lumenick, New York Post
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“FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1927, METROPOLIS EXISTS! Lang's work has finally re-emerged; in many respects a new film, neither smothered by overfamiliarity nor butchered by cutting. Older versions were plotbound, so that for all its vast scale the film seemed constrained. Only with the Argentine footage does Metropolis breathe freely, encompassing the places and rhythms of everyday life.”
– Chris Fujiawara, Film Comment
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“The shape of Metropolis can at last be fully perceived in all its visionary splendor, allegorical breadth, and suspense!”
– David Edelstein, New York magazine
“The added material of Lang's incomparable dystopian thriller's dramatic and emotional import comes through powerfully, and adds a wealth of expressive detail and rhythmic grandeur to the now familiar, albeit ever-astounding, iconography of awesome yet oppressive technology.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“The opportunity to see a version as close to the original as anyone living has ever had – a thrillerish subplot and elongated crescendo, showing off more of the 36,000 extras. Lang's sky-scraping, heavens-reaching city looks as glorious as ever.”
– Mark Asch, The L Magazine
“EDITORS' PICK! Lang's epic may have added context and sprawl, but it never stopped being great. A wide-eyed fever dream of modernist architecture, sci-fi paranoia, and good old-fashioned melodrama.”
– New York Magazine
(1927) Beneath the gleaming towers of a gigantic city of the future, the pampered son of the Big Boss himself is smitten by a young woman (Brigitte Helm) ushering workers’ children on a topside field trip, and follows her back to the depths — where he discovers what really makes Metropolis run. And as slavishly regimented workers toil amid smoke-belching machinery, he has a vision of slaves lining up for sacrifice at the flaming mouth of the idol Moloch. But, anticipating unrest, the Boss makes plans to defuse it, inciting a crazed inventor to fashion an agent provocateuse, the “robot-Maria” (Helm again!). Lang’s visionary work of science fiction redefined the term “super-production,” with its thousands of extras, monstrous sets, and eye-popping special effects, including a cataclysmic, multitude-engulfing flood. A legend almost from first release, Metropolis was seen as Lang conceived it only by the earliest Berlin audiences (“positively overwhelming,” raved the Variety critic after the premiere) — and then the cutting began. A 1984 “restoration” ran only 87 minutes, while the “definitive” 2002 reconstruction edged up the running time to 124 minutes. That seemed to be it, until... In 2008, the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires came across a 16mm print that had been lying in Argentinean private collections since 1928. At a private screening in Berlin, “the room got very quiet,” as the select audience was witnessing 1,257 shots that were long thought lost — bringing the running time to 147 minutes and virtually matching the original shooting script and musical cues. This astounding new version — after considerable restoration work on the well-worn 16mm original — has been edited into the 2002 restoration, with the original 1927 orchestral score, resulting in, at long last, Lang’s original spectacular as he intended it. “For all its magnificence, the Metropolis as we knew it was illogical in places and suffered as a result. For years audiences have wondered how good this film might have been had it not been edited. It turns out that it’s better than anyone could ever have expected. The added footage ratchets up the tension dramatically. There are whole new sequences and a fresh pacing which emphasizes the feeling of the perils to come. In the second half that extra footage really elevates it. The addition of biblical references brings the spiritual-vs.-science battle to the forefront. Metropolis now feels suitably epic and tense throughout.” – Kaleem Aftab, The Independent (London).
A KINO INTERNATIONAL RELEASE Kino Lorber
“A MASTERPIECE OF VISIONARY SILENT CINEMA... one of the strangest, most fascinating films ever made, a futuristic nightmare that is both sublime in its grandeur and remarkably intimate in its emotions. Just about every science-fiction movie you can think of pays tribute to its influence, but to date none has matched its strangeness or its prophetic power.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“The greatest of all pulp fantasies! Lang’s profligate hallucination of a future city is a movie
whose every detail is subsumed to the overall effect.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
“The plutonium template for sci-fi moviemaking...
Remains one of the most inspirational and influential movies of any genre.”
– John Anderson, Newsday
“A superspectacle... ESSENTIAL.” – Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
“Lang’s pop-visionary epic has always been a milestone of precision craftsmanship on a gargantuan scale.
A proto-noir suspense film... a mad-scientist extravaganza and all-out disaster flick!”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker
“One of the handsomest, visually most inventive films of the 20th century,
and certainly one of the all-time great sci-fi films... a powerful parable.”
– NY Press
FOR SALE AT CONCESSIONS DURING THE RUN OF THE FILM:
METROPOLIS
by Thomas Elsaesser
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