М (M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder) [Sub: Eng]

Lang's movie is that rare thing, a nail-biting soul-searcher. While M steers clear of analyzing deviance, it is startling in its musings on which punishment fits an inhuman crime.

Our identification with [Lorre] as a psychopath is so complete it's hard to believe that while appearing before Fritz Lang's cameras in the daytime, he was, at night, acting as a comedian in a farce.

Few films are gripping and effective 82 years after their original release, but this one surely is.

This is a movie that dares to sympathize with a sick person, that risks making the monster real and us (in an era when Germany's cinema was still shellacked in canted angles and fanciful shadows).

The moral issues are complex and deftly handled: Lorre is at once entirely innocent and absolutely evil. Lang's detached, modified expressionist style gives the action a plastic beauty.

An extraordinary, good, impressive and strong talker. Again fine work by Fritz Lang, and his wife and helper, Thea von Harbou.

[VIDEO ESSAY] A precursor to the serial killer and policier genres, "M" is first and foremost a suspense thriller made all the more gripping because the identity of the killer is revealed in the first act.

Lang's razor-sharp dissection of crime and punishment never puts a foot wrong.

It is a cousin to the early Hitchcock of The Lodger, and I have always found something even something faintly Ealingesque about its cynicism and satire.

You'll never look at a novelty balloon in the same way again.

The movie looms over our cinema like a hand of consequence, haunting us with its austerity and power long after others have faded from the mind.

Lang's film is a must-see for even a moderately ambitious film buff.