'Dark City' (1998) – Alex Proyas.

Sadly, upon its initially all-too limited cinema release, Alex Proyas's visually enthralling, desperately doomy dystopian nightmare 'Dark City' was poorly received, largely due to crass studio revisions, and grossly inept marketing, but even in its truncated form, many of the impactful noirish eccentricities remained eerily intact, and the demonstratively improved director's cut is tantamount to a veritable revelation, as maestro Proyas's delectably labyrinthine, highly stylized, sky-high, super sinister Sci-fi mystery is now greatly improved, giving this reality-spinning cult classic an entirely new lease of cinematic life. The initially Kafkaesque nightmare of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) groggily awakening in an unfamiliar body, with a wife he doesn't recognize in a constantly mutable shadow city very soon escalates to pure, unleavened existential terror, as he becomes ceaselessly hunted by pallid-looking, Noirish Cenobite-like alien enforcers, and in his desperate attempt to elude capture, the increasingly discombobulated John discovers that he might be the bizarre messianic catalyst in a morbidly-majestic metaphysical conspiracy that is quite literally out of this world! Before 'The Matrix' there was the really dark matter of 'Dark City'.