Dark City: Critic Reviews

City ultimately plays like one of those art-deco dystopian CD-ROM adventures of recent years.

...so relentlessly trippy in a fun-house sort of way that it could very easily inspire a daredevil cult of moviegoers who go back again and again to experience its mind-bending twists and turns.

If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will.

[A] stylish hybrid of futuristic thriller and film noir.

Dark City by Alex Proyas is a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A mishmash of iconography lifted from better movies.

It is all well and good that nobody has anything to laugh about in this movie, but the relentless gloom and frothing paranoia soon begin to drag on an earthly audience.

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.

Dark City ... contains more philosophical and cinematic ideas in ten minutes than the last ten films I've seen put together.

Dark City has all the Gothic imagery and plot incoherence of a Tim Burton movie, without Burton's mad-scientist merriment.

An almost really good movie lies somewhere in the stylish junkyard of Alex Proyas's Dark City.

Dark City has as stunning a visual texture as that of any movie that I've seen.

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.

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...

...the movie is mostly style, but it's a style so engrossing, it more than makes up for any lack of substance.

In the annals of noir Sci-Fi, by any measure, this is a Classic of cinematic invention.

It does not take long to realize that there is a lot less here than meets the eye.

This is one of those movies that's more concerned with set design motivation than anything that's going on inside the characters' heads.

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.

One of the most ludicrous movies in years.

Dark City is a truly scary flick.