Average Rating: 6.9/10
Reviews Counted: 80
Fresh: 59 | Rotten: 21
Stylishly gloomy, Dark City offers a polarizing whirl of arresting visuals and noirish action.
Average Rating: 6.3/10
Critic Reviews: 19
Fresh: 12 | Rotten: 7
Stylishly gloomy, Dark City offers a polarizing whirl of arresting visuals and noirish action.
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Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 137,465
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Alex Proyas (The Crow) directed this noir-styled futuristic thriller, scripted by Proyas, Lem Dobbs (Kafka), and David S. Goyer (The Puppet Masters). Separated from his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly), amnesiac John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens alone in a strange hotel to learn he is wanted for a series of brutal killings -- but he can't remember if he did or didn't commit these murders. Indeed, most of his memories have completely vanished, and he becomes the focus of interest for both mad
R, 1 hr. 43 min.
Feb 27, 1998 Wide
Jul 28, 1998
New Line Cinema
All Critics (80) | Top Critics (19) | Fresh (63) | Rotten (21) | DVD (31)
A mishmash of iconography lifted from better movies.
Dark City trades in such weighty themes as memory, thought control, human will and the altering of reality, but is engaging mostly in the degree to which it creates and sustains a visually startling alternate universe.
City ultimately plays like one of those art-deco dystopian CD-ROM adventures of recent years.
[A] stylish hybrid of futuristic thriller and film noir.
Proyas floods the screen with cinematic and literary references ranging from Murnau and Lang to Kafka and Orwell, creating a unique yet utterly convincing world.
If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will.
Mind-stretching, futuristic sci-fi can get gory.
A visionary slice of visceral experience.
Writer/Director Alex Proyas needs to stop it with the writing and concentrate on making the pretty. He needs to find a good script and just direct it.
If anything can be said of the movie that keeps it relevant in a time when ideas are of a different supply, it's that it is one of the few movies of years past that endures not because it has a lot to say, but because it inspires its viewers to say more.
The experience of Dark City is one that no film lover should miss... seen now as it was intended after 10 long years of wandering in the shadows.
Proyas assembles his inspirations into a unique amalgam with the power of myth to tap the fears and desires of our collective unconscious. [Blu-Ray]
mixes visual marvels with B-movie archetypes
Was "The Matrix" before "The Matrix" was ever in the pop culture lexicon...
In the annals of noir Sci-Fi, by any measure, this is a Classic of cinematic invention.
...grim, fascinating, always absorbing, wildly imaginative, and not a little scary. (Blu-ray Edition)
...the movie is mostly style, but it's a style so engrossing, it more than makes up for any lack of substance.
How this underrated sci-fi gem should have been released back in 1998 . . .
A bit hack thematically, very digital, absolutely breakneck pacing visually and plotwise, dreamy illogical... kinda cool hyper-pastiche. Dick Tracy meets Kafka in the Matrix
July 6, 2007Super Reviewer
Released around the same time as the more action-savvy "Matrix", "Dark City" explores the similar fundamental properties of what can be defined as the soul. Superbly acted and directed, it blends well-executed aspects of Film Noir, with the premises of scientific experimentation, mental evolution and the expansion of
March 19, 2012Super Reviewer
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