1. Metropolis
If you are a fan of the science fiction genre, you owe a debt of gratitude to Fritz Lang for creating the silent classic Metropolis. It's a perfect spectacle, with eerie set pieces that are impressive even to audiences who grew up watching modern blockbusters. Metropolis was the most expensive silent film ever made, and it shows -- the film has a scope and a sense of ambition that was unprecedented in the medium. Lang had a tremendous attention to detail and a lyricism that created visually dynamic scenes at a time when most camera work had a tendency to be relatively static. One only has to watch the sequence where the workers shuffle to the factory together, hundreds of mindless drones perfectly in sync with one another, to see how genuinely exciting Lang's filmmaking style was. It's an enduring science fiction classic that not only influenced an entire genre beyond measure, but can be watched to this very day with the same sense of wonder that audiences in 1927 must have felt.