“Spies,” Fritz Lang’s 1928 tour de force of serial thrills, megalomania, and oppressive but thoroughly justified paranoia, opens with a rifled safe, a motorcyclist speeding off the screen, and a diplomat murdered in broad daylight. The center cannot hold, and there is no time to catch your breath. Terrorists strike at will, yet no one knows who they are or what they want. Meanwhile, the public mocks the hapless government, as does an exposed spy who blithely warns the head of the secret service that he will regret learning who is behind the terror. He’s not far wrong, because the underworld autocrat pulling the strings, a Lenin look-alike named Haghi, has other identities with which he hides in plain sight. By definition, espionage obliterates the line between friend and foe, and everyone in “Spies” is a spy of one kind or another.

Lang was the most prophetic of 20th-century filmmakers. The comprehensiveness of his futuristic vision puts him on par with Wells, Huxley, Orwell, the trinity of British Jeremiahs, who subjected human nature to science and politics, while his anatomy of chaos anticipates, no less than Kafka and Canetti, a world of ceaseless fear, moral dubiety, organized lunacy, fascist ambition, and implacable revenge. We describe everyday frustrations as Kafkaesque, but immersion in Lang is likely to produce a comparable sense of Langian parallels: Nothing is what it seems, crime and social order are indistinguishable, and technology is our salvation and ruin. As Kafka uses literary techniques and tropes to set up deterministic parables, Lang relies on the fundamental resources of film: the pulp fiction of serial thrillers, from Louis Feuillade to “The Perils of Pauline”; the visual effects of Lumiere; the interweaving plot strands of Griffith; the stark record of newsreels.

In addition to inventing the rocket countdown in “Woman on the Moon,” instant messaging in “Spies,” and urban castles in “Metropolis,” he foretells our obsession with serial killers in “M,” as well as exploring the rise of fascism and pathology of crowds. Lang also created the stick figures without which modern popular culture is unimaginable, not least 007 and his nemeses.

The hero of “Spies” is 326, an improbably wealthy government agent who wears a tuxedo when at home with his servant, but goes undercover as a derelict. Played by the engaging and mostly understated Willy Fritsch, he resembles a cross between the young Rutger Hauer and Dwight Frye. Unlike Bond, he is a one-woman man, but the woman is Haghi’s most effective agent, a Russian emigree whose family was destroyed by Tsarist supporters, played by the soulfully Aryan goddess Gerda Maurus; her many crimes are forgiven when she betrays the fiend in favor of 326. Lang’s favorite arch criminal, Rudolph Klein-Rogge, who also created Dr. Mabuse, brings Haghi to life; he is part Blofeld, part Dr. No, with elements of Strangelove and Mr. Memory, the music-hall performer Hitchcock devised for his version of “The 39 Steps.”

“Spies” is a variation on “Dr. Mabuse the Gambler” (1922) but moves with far greater authority. After a smashing opener, there is an adagio movement of about 20 minutes as the threads of the narrative are established (the score, which might have helped here, slips into an unaccompanied piano coma). The payoff is the last hour, a carnival of astonishing sequences including a wicked seduction, hara-kiri, a train wreck, a car chase, an assassin who looks like Hitler and goes completely crazy, shooting indiscriminately while shouting into a microphone and then taking cyanide (how prophetic is that?), and a finale so startling – a contender for the most haunting closer ever filmed that, even 76 years later, it would be an injustice to disclose it to anyone approaching “Spies” for the first time.

Kino’s DVD has no extras to speak of, but the splendid print, which restores 50 essential minutes, requires none. The same is true of “Woman in the Moon,” for which Lang reunited Fritsch and Maurus as a non-couple, though from the first moment Fritsch looks longingly at her, you know that her husband isn’t long for the world – which, in this flipped cosmos, turns out to be the moon. Widely regarded as minor Lang, it nonetheless holds one’s attention for nearly three hours, and the main set-piece, the launching of the rocket (Lang invented the countdown because he thought it more suspenseful than counting up), remains impressive.

The crowd scenes, surely inspired by the Lindbergh landing, prefigure the opening of Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” and the accuracy of the science – Lang hired physicists Willy Ley and Hermann Oberth – caused the Nazis to ban it for fear it would give away their plans for the V1 and V2 rockets. Once again the villain, played by the chillingly unctuous Fritz Rasp, suggests Hitler, complete with military fatigues and a greased comb-down (“Mein Kampf” had appeared four years earlier), and the plot is ladled with spies, greed, and blackmail. The hero declares, “I do not intend to colonize the moon with criminals,” but a world without crime would leave Lang empty-handed.

By 1929, film directors were coming to grips with sound, and the best of them were determined to use it in ways unique to cinema – Clair in France, Hitchcock in England, Mamoulian in Hollywood. Lang’s producers had tried to force him to add sound to “Woman on the Moon,” but he refused and consequently remained silent for the next 18 months. His return, with “M” in 1931, innovatively used offstage and overlapping dialogue, yet much of its enduring power resides in long silent passages, where even a musical score would be intrusive. This virtually perfect work, which made Peter Lorre an international sensation, is so compulsively watchable that Irving Thalberg once castigated the MGM team for not making films as good – though one can imagine his reaction had one of his employees suggested a film about a child molester trading accusations with a Brechtian union of criminals depicted as interchangeable with the police.

The Criterion Collection released what seemed a perfectly acceptable version of “M” in 1997, but the new two-disc edition is far more than a collector’s enhancement. For the first time, the film is presented in the original aspect ratio (taller than it is wide), which removes a gray bar that ran across the top of the image in the previous version and adds information to the top of the image. It also restores the original ending. The previous version ends with the mother of a dead child wailing, “We too should keep a closer watch on our children.” The corrected line is “One has to keep closer watch … over the children! [fade to black] All of you!” More impressive than any of that is the brilliance of the print – the black, whites, and grays far more sharply delineated than ever before.

The extras include a 50-minute interview with Lang, in which he describes in detail the circumstances in which he left Germany after meeting with Goebbels – a tale now thought to be, in part, a fabrication, and Claude Chabrol’s 10-minute version of “M,” plus a too-brief interview in which he marvels at Lang’s technique, mentioning shots that can only work if timed exactly as he did them. One of the most remarkable shots in Lang’s film, which Chabrol wisely refrained from attempting, is a two-and-a-half minute tracking pan (it begins at 42:17), which explores the beggars in their lair, much as Martin Scorsese would later trail his camera through a social club in “Goodfellas.” Midway, the shot closes in on a sandwich board and you expect an edit, but the camera rises toward a window grating and goes right through.

In 1936, Lang himself would wriggle through the grating of Hollywood and make films there for 20 years, including an unparalleled study of lynching, “Fury,” for MGM, which had no further use for his services; a template for “Bonnie and Clyde,” “You Only Love Once,” and his true American masterpieces, “The Woman in the Window,” “Scarlet Street,” “Ministry of Fear,” “Rancho Notorious,” “The Big Heat,” and “While the City Sleeps” (a serial killer film told from the vantage of a corrupt press).

Good as those films are, Lang could never recapture the diffuse and gargantuan vision of his German period when he seemed to have the pulse of the world pumping in his veins.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.