Average Rating: 9/10
Reviews Counted: 40
Fresh: 40 | Rotten: 0
A landmark psychological thriller with arresting images, deep thoughts on modern society, and Peter Lorre in his finest performance.
Average Rating: 8.4/10
Critic Reviews: 8
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 0
A landmark psychological thriller with arresting images, deep thoughts on modern society, and Peter Lorre in his finest performance.
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Average Rating: 4.4/5
User Ratings: 32,448
Fritz Lang's classic early talkie crime melodrama is set in 1931 Berlin. The police are anxious to capture an elusive child murderer (Peter Lorre), and they begin rounding up every criminal in town. The underworld leaders decide to take the heat off their activities by catching the child killer themselves. Once the killer is fingered, he is marked with the letter "M" chalked on his back. He is tracked down and captured by the combined forces of the Berlin criminal community, who put him on trial
Unrated, 1 hr. 45 min.
Drama, Art House & International, Mystery & Suspense
Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou, Paul Falkenberg, Adolf Jansen, Karl Vash
Aug 31, 1931 Wide
Oct 20, 1998
Foremco
All Critics (40) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (47) | Rotten (0) | DVD (18)
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.
[An] important film which rightly deserves its success.
Lorre's performance as a desperate killer who insists he can't help himself remains his finest hour on film.
It's an impeccable film -- a model of psychological suspense and a stunning display of Lang's power and skill.
The film grows more unsettling when it becomes apparent that the child killer Beckert is something of a child himself, forcing the audience into something beyond complicity, something dangerously close to identification.
Criterion has now released the quintessential edition of Fritz Lang's inscrutable masterpiece on Blu-ray.
...a touchstone, one of those classics that infects the popular imagination to the point that it's really not necessary for most people to have actually seen it to recognize its signal moments ...
M is responsible for some of the most memorable images and sequences in cinema history
Fritz Lang entered the sound era with a bold expressionist thriller that captured the ugly mood of the years before the Third Reich.
Put simply, without M to show the way, there might have been no subsequent films in which a hidden killer unmasks the ills of the society around him
Fascinating early talkie that made Peter Lorre a star as child murderer hunted by all.
Peter Lorre's finest performance, and a truly significant socially-themed film.
Remarkable early look at scientific and police detection - and of a city in fear
A subversive film, or more simply a movie brimming over with the ferment of Lang's imagination at its height? You choose.
Even after 75 years, Fritz Lang's first German talkie works beautifully as a carefully constructed thriller and police procedural.
M is the most dynamic profile of a serial killer in film.
It's creepy and masterful with many indelible scenes and a knockout performance by Peter Lorre.
Brooding and atmospheric, M has at its core all the salaciousness of ripped-from-the-headlines entertainment.
It's a movie you will watch mostly for it's historical importance, it's cinematic techniques, and for Lorre's performance. Too many scenes of people smoking and having reunions, not enough interesting characters.
June 4, 2008
Super Reviewer
One of the front runners for Fritz Lang's best films, and one of the best examples of German expression and the modernist movement, M is a story with a message that is either moralistic of the times or includes fear tactics in modern society. The film was made as Germany's first sound film, and created the serial
August 8, 2010Super Reviewer
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