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A classic tale of catechizing human virtue in pre-Nazi Germany, Lang's first talkie keeps us terrorized with onscreen dialogue and asynchronous off-screen sounds. The adumbral opening is flawless Expressionism—menacing cuckoos, leering abandonment and the awakening of sheer terror within one silhouette.

If there's one thing that Fritz Lang's 1931 film M still teaches us, it's that beyond all else, filmmakers should strive to place images on the screen that he or she sincerely believes will have never been seen before. An astounding hybrid of Bible-black film noir and a lithe take on German expressionist dynamics in which the shadows are literally out to kill you, there's nary a shot in this film which (still) doesn't feel as fresh as a new-growth daisy.

To M's towering credit, the murderer stares back at us in the mirror: 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). When Lorre is thrown to the floor, wailing in a moment of capture, we see him as human, painfully flesh and blood. Lang doesn't excuse this soul, nor does he turn him into some rarefied supergenius.

The filmmaker's acute use of objects, symbols, letters, and codes to decrypt a relatively simple narrative remains as perfect an example of pure cinema in the sound era as one is likely to find, and despite the now borderline-jejune subject matter, M's urgency hasn't aged a day.

Shot in only six weeks, it's the best of all serial-killer movies — a dubious thriller subgenre after Lang and three of his disciples, Jacques Tourneur (The Leopard Man, 1943), Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, 1960), and Michael Powell (Peeping Tom, 1960), abandoned it. M is also a masterpiece structured with the kind of perfection that calls to mind both poetry and architecture and that makes even his disciples' classics seem minor by comparison.