In the following essay, Dadoun discusses Lang's Metropolis in terms of its moral ideology and presents possible reasons why Hitler admired the film.

In the following essay, Neumann discusses the urban architecture of Lang's Metropolis in light of contemporary thought about monumentalism, technological progress, and skyscrapers.

In the following essay, Williams discusses the narrative structure of Lang's Metropolis using A.G. Greimas's system of analysis.

These days many passages in Metropolis seem old-fashioned and even vaguely ridiculous, especially those in which the Kolossal is overlarded with sentiment. Lang had not yet attained the simplicity of M, in which reality is made to resound quite naturally with overtones of the weird…. The deliberate symmetry of Siegfried conveys a slow, inexorable rhythm like that of the destiny brooding over the epic. But in the crowd scenes in Metropolis the rhythm becomes dynamic. In addition to having an observant...

["Metropolis"], for all its thesis and its subtitular dialectic …, is much more akin to the romantic vagaries of "Siegfried" than to the realities of [F. W. Murnau's] "The Last Laugh." For Fritz Lang, who directed both "Siegfried" and "Metropolis," is not a cinema radical…. [He] thinks in terms of sheer visual beauty, composition, and group rhythms rather than of dynamics. He is still of the theater of [Max] Reinhardt...

If "Metropolis" fails to be quite a great film, the fault lies, not with its brilliant German producers, nor with its subject matter, nor with the actual treatment of this picture-parable of life next century. It fails because the cinema as yet fails to be quite adequate as a means of expression. Here on the screen is a concrete picture of a great city of the future…. The imagination of Fritz Lang, the director, and of the studio-architects and designers who have brought this vision to ...

[What] is this "bigness of outlook" that distinguishes Metropolis? The architectural sets and the photography are extremely competent craftsmanship. After that, what? It is a vision of the future…. The idea of the machine city of the future, of robots, etc., is the common property of all up-to-date journalists. No one in the cinema to-day could conceive and transmit the future as it will probably be. A subject which occupies some of the best minds of Europe, which has such unplumbed dep...