Dark City

Rufus Sewell awakens in someone else's nightmare in a perpetual-night city of shifting landscapes and identities. But as everyone falls asleep on the stroke of midnight, Sewell awakens to watch the city morph in front of his eyes, and he discovers cadaverous men in black on his trail – is he mad or has he stumbled upon a conspiracy that shatters all convictions of reality? It's the damnedest alien abduction story ever made, a controlled experiment in human behavior run by extraterrestrial scientists treating the human race like lab rats, but it's also a movie about making movies and playing with stories. These depressed, downtrodden souls are unwitting actors in a film being made – and remade – around them, with sets torn down and rebuilt and actors suddenly recast in new roles, their parts injected directly into their minds. Jennifer Connelly is the torch singer who may be Sewell's wife, and Kiefer Sutherland is a shuffling, sniveling mad scientist who appears to have escaped from a German Expression silent film.

This new edition of the 1998 cult sci-fi noir features both the original theatrical release and an extended director's cut, which doesn't add scenes so much as it fills out detail with extended footage and atmospheric touches, yet also withholds information to keep the film shrouded in mystery longer. Also features new commentary by director Alex Proyas, who describes his inspirations and explains the differences in this new cut, as well as a commentary track pieced together from interviews with co-writers Lem Dobbs and David Goyer, and Roger Ebert's commentary from the original DVD release. A very handy "Director's Cut Fact Track" identifies the differences in the new version with pop-up notes, and the 43-minute retrospective documentary "Memories of Shell Beach" revisits the film with new interviews with Proyas, his co-writers, producers and other collaborators. The disc was actually released a couple of weeks ago on both DVD and Blu-ray, but it arrived too late for review. Being a slow week for releases, it's a great time to revisit this delirious visual and cerebral treat, which looks stupendous on Blu-ray.