Popular reviews

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★½ 4

  New Line forcing Proyas to add a voiceover before the opening credits that explains the entire mystery of his big mystery movie has to be one of the dumbest studio notes in the history of Hollywood.

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  Review by PTAbro ★★ 24

  Dark City is a frustrating mess. Full of borrowed ideas, from film noir to sci-fi, Kafka to Lang, Blade Runner to Brazil, Dark City co-opts aspects originally intriguing and fails to make them its own, let alone present them coherently. It is fractured, tedious, and, worst of all, without a heart. I mildly enjoyed the last act, where a fraction of the directions the film seemed to be going in finally clarified, but with a mind-numbingly wooden protagonist and a final confrontation rendered laughable due to budgetary constraints, it didn't even come close to redeeming the prior 3 hours (technically 80 minutes, but that's how long it felt to me).

  Besides its ambitiousness never quite congealing into an involving narrative,…

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  Review by Will Sloan

  This is part of a wave of 1998/1999 movies - including The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, and The Truman Show - that are explicitly or implicitly about trying to discover an alternative to the malaise of this Best of All Possible Worlds that the End of History has brought us. They all imagine upper-middle-class American life as hollow and artificial, and their characters attempt with varying success to find or build an alternative world. They don't make these movies anymore. Now they make movies like Ready Player One and Space Jam: A New Legacy that begin in reality and see the characters taking the Blue Pill to enter a fantasyworld. The characters then devote themselves to protecting that fantasyworld.…

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 18

  "When was the last time you remember doing something during the day?"

  The only "something" I remember "doing during the day" for the past week and a half is listening to Dark City commentaries while I work from home, and I think I might slowly be turning into Wolenski. The chase music has been haunting me day and night. Were large portions of this soundtrack reused for The Matrix? It seems like they might have been released too close together, but I swear the musical motif at 2:26-2:39 and the sound effect at 3:34 in "Into the City" (and elsewhere) are lifted wholesale by the Wachowskis (or whoever did their sound design). Maybe I'm just being paranoid?

  You see, I…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 8

  Ambitious neo noir sci-fi jam from Proyas is incredibly hard for someone like me to dislike. It may be bullshit but it’s my kind of bullshit, and I remember folks used to love this movie a lot more before The Matrix came out... then that monolith dropped and usurped this (similar) movie just kinda sank into the limbo abyss... which is a damn shame if you ask me because I think Dark City has much to offer. 

  Maybe it’s because I (still) love The Crow and Proyas (Gods of Eygpt fan right here) but I always felt like this (and him) have gotten the wrong end of the stick for far too long. Like The Crow, there’s some truly awesome production design and…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★★ 43

  THIS REVIEW IS FOR THE DIRECTOR'S CUT.

  This is better than The Matrix.

  Allow me to explain....

  Look, while I still love and can appreciate The Matrix and you can look and see I gave it just a half star less than this one - by the end of the day if we analyze everything in terms of imagination, in terms of technical work, in terms of story and in terms of actual performance, there's a whole case to be made that this is a slightly superior beast (and for those wondering why I am comparing the two, you might wanna check more info online).

  In terms of performances, everyone just did a phenomenal job. Rufus Sewell is one of…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★ 3

  With the exception of the very cool "tuning" sequences I honestly don't think this really has much up its sleeve other than being consistently gorgeous and lovingly production-designed. The noir backdrop and paranoid metatext aren't really synthesized into anything new or weird in the way, say, THE MATRIX would do with its more diverse set of influences just a year later. And even beyond the incredibly ill-advised studio-mandated opening voice-over that completely dissolves any mystery the film might have, it constantly goes out of its way to explain itself to you while most of the characters have to remain baffled so they can execute the plot. Imagine if you actually had to figure this out.

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  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★½ 12

  Reviewing the Director's Cut!

  A visual masterpiece filled to the rim with Sci-Fi goodness! Certain scenes were reminiscent of spectacular visuals found in the film Inception! Proficient in creating a truly dark atmospheric cinematic experience! A technical marvel!

  Weakness: I found the characters to be quite bland and lifeless! I also felt it lacked any sense of urgency! Sadly I could never invest in the tale enough to be horrified by the events of the film!

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  Review by pd187 ★★★★½ 1

  the pale, unfeeling strangers obsessively rearranging their city and its inhabitants every night in a futile attempt to understand humanity reminds me of some of yall on here🤣🤣

  cc flat earth gods egypt gnostic k. harris/karl/kamala etc: "small world!"

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  Review by Joe Lynch ★★★★

  It’s been over 20 years since I’ve seen this film and the sheer fact it was made by a major studio (New Line) in a a major transition period and even with supposed exec tinkering holds up as a massive work of art is a minor miracle. 
  Does it make sense? Does it matter?
  MaNY of the visuals, themes and color palate predate THE MATRIX (and they even share some of the same sets!) and more than a few times I thought “needs more Kung Fu” but it’s still a towering achievement that feels like dark pop art from someone who cashed in their “Fuck You” success card.
  And it was worth it.

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  Review by adambolt ★★★½

  shout out to the studio exec who thought it was a good idea to spoil the entire fucken movie in the first 10 seconds

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  Review by Wesley R. Ball ★★★★★ 3

  Viewed the Director's Cut

  If Blade Runner and The Big Sleep had a baby, it would be Alex Proyas's masterpiece, Dark City. It's a gorgeous blend of sci-fi, mystery, and film noir- three of my favorite genres.

  I would try to explain the plot, but you're better off reading the Letterboxd description or, better yet, going in blind. Everything is a spoiler. I was told to just view the director's cut because the original version explains everything and spoils the whole plot in the first five minutes. Better not to take any chances, right?

  The acting is astounding, Kiefer Sutherland just nails it in this film. He plays a neurotic scientist, and his character is as enigmatic as the whole…