"quaintly steampunk and disjunctively contemporary"

...and on top of that crypto-marxist, proto-fascist and hyper-capitalist too! from village voice review of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Easily trouncing the recent Hollywood heat rash of over-extended superheroes and Hasbro infomercials, this summer's most satisfying sci-fi blockbuster is a crypto-Marxist, proto-Fascist spectacle first released 80 years ago: Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the legendary art deco futuro-fable of industrialist excess, proletarian rebellion, and robot romance, one of the last big-budget exhilarations of the pre-talkie era. Once considered merely hokey and excessive, Lang's hyper-capitalist vision of workers oppressed by mechanical Molochs as their labor sustains a paradise for wealthy technocrats now seems both quaintly steampunk and disjunctively contemporary.

It is playing at the filmforum starting this friday. Recommended, despite all those big and mystifying words.