Review of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by J. Scott F — 01 Jan 2014

A happily married farmer falls for a city temptress who convinces him to drown his wife and sell his farm. But as he sets out to do it, he realises how much her really loves her. It's hard to find a film so audacious in matching complex visual experimentation with emotional purity.

Murnau's film feels greatly influential to the language of filmmaking that was to come and even to this day it's easy to see why it's regarded as groundbreaking. It achieves an unsurpassed level of beauty and cinematic lyricism thanks to the ambition of its creator, and that is why this film happily takes its place among the greatest of all time and certainly of the silent era, of which it represented its final part.