The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

95. 1931 - M

M 1931
Eureka Entertainment

Honourable Mentions: City Lights, Dracula, Frankenstein

While most famous for his long-reaching influence on science fiction with 1927's Metropolis, the expressionistic stylings of Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang were most heavily felt within a different genre: film noir. Lang would cement this reputation with multiple genre classics in the 1950s (including one that makes an appearance on this list), but one of his boldest efforts remains one of his earlier films - a German-set thriller starring Peter Lorre, M.

Lang's first sound feature and one that catapulted Lorre to international stardom, M is both deliriously paranoid and unabashedly dark, focusing its action on Lorre's Hans Beckert - a serial killer who preys upon children in Berlin - as an investigation and manhunt slowly begins to tighten the noose around his neck.

Like Metropolis before it, M exemplifies the technical daring of Weimar-era cinema as well as its thematic maturity, and remains a touchstone of noir filmmaking.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.