structural:summarization
Later acclaim

According to Roger Ebert, " Metropolis is one of the great achievements of the silent era, a work so audacious in its vision and so angry in its message that it is, if anything, more powerful today than when it was made." Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide 's entry on the film reads, "Heavy going at times but startling set design and special effects command attention throughout."

Colin Greenland reviewed Metropolis for Imagine magazine, and stated that "It's a measure of the sheer power of Lang's vision that it survives this heavy-handed cosmetic modernizing quite intact. Inspired by his first sight of Manhattan, Metropolis is a dark dream of the city of 2026, where the idle rich live in penthouses and play in rooftop pleasure gardens while the faceless workers toil in the machine caverns far, far below."

The film has an approval rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 126 reviews, with an average rating of 9.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A visually awe-inspiring science fiction classic from the silent era." In Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 98 out of 100 based on 14 critics, Indicating "universal acclaim". It also ranked 12th in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. The 2002 version was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Awards "Special Award" for the restoration. In 2012, in correspondence with the Sight & Sound Poll, the British Film Institute called Metropolis the 35th-greatest film of all time. In the 2022 version of the poll, Metropolis fell slightly to 67th place.

Lane Roth in Film Quarterly called it a "seminal film" because of its concerns with "profound impact technological progress has on man's social and spiritual progress" and concluded that "ascendancy of artifact over nature is depicted not as liberating man, but as subjugating and corrupting him". Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker."

Exploring the dramatic production background and historical importance of the film's complex political context in The American Conservative, film historian Cristobal Catalan suggests "Metropolis is a passionate call, and equally a passionate caution, for social change". Peter Bradshaw noted that the Maschinenmensch based on Maria is "a brilliant eroticisation and fetishisation of modern technology".