Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1999)

Here The Crow director Proyas throws detective film noir, The Truman Show and The Matrix into a mangle and then cranks for a while until a paste of passable consistency emerges.
This is a slightly cruel reduction: being contemporaneous with the two blockbusters mentioned, there's no concrete evidence of any idea theft from either. What it is, though, is suffering by comparison with either: the '40s gumshoe patina doesn't make the idea of a fake world outside the city as universally appealing as in Truman, and the aliens responsible for the shifting reality, being led by arch-cheesemonger Richard O'Brien, don't have the chilling vim of The Matrix's tyrannical computer program as the antagonist.
Rufus Sewell does well enough as the eventually messianic hero on the run, but William Hurt's cop is stolid rather than stoic and Kiefer Sutherland's pseudo-Mengele mumbling doctor is just plain silly. Its prettiness is also offset by some grave gaps in narrative logic and an ADHD 1.8-second average shot length. Taken on its own merits, then, it just about bears up, but refinements on the ideas by other films have made it a bit superfluous.

5/10