Metropolis

In a futuristic city sharply divided between the rich and the poor, the son of the city's mastermind meets a prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.

Now universally regarded as a landmark of cinema, Metropolis was a far more contested film when it first appeared — contemporary critics often found its story muddled, its symbolism overwrought, and its running time exhausting, even as they marveled at its visual scale. The gap between that initial skepticism and the film's near-total critical canonization is one of the more striking reversals in film history, and the tension between its breathtaking imagery and its perceived narrative naivety has never entirely gone away.