DARK CITY (1998)

DARK CITY Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly (1998, New Line, R, $103.99) A visually sumptuous, thematically fertile melding of every urban paranoid vision from The Trial to Metropolis to Brazil, City ultimately plays like one of those art-deco dystopian CD-ROM adventures of recent years: Amnesiac man (Sewell) wakes up in mysterious big-city hotel room and must figure out where he is, who he is, and what the vast conspiracy is all about (you know, that vast conspiracy). As written and directed by The Crow's Alex Proyas, it's a little short on coherence and long on comic-book sensationalism -- dig the hokey, climactic Battle of the Minds between the hero and a cadaverous Mr. Big -- but there's no denying the nightmarish pull of the film's aesthetic. Like his soulless alien villains, Proyas creates an entire world -- and traps us there. B