Dark City: Director's Cut / **** (1998)

The opportunity to revisit “Dark City” ten years from whence it found its way into the imaginations of a generation of eloquent and sophisticated movie-goers is, in many ways, just as staggering as it is rewarding. A personal barometer for which most (if not all) films have been measured in the years since, the film endures with me as one of the ageless, nourishing visions of modern cinema, significant for the fact that it attained a certain scope of detail that continues to drive the true promise of filmmaking. When I wrote my first series of online reviews in the summer of 1998, here was the film that I would proudly call the benchmark of my critiquing inspiration – and now a decade has passed, time has caught up with me, and both the movie and I meet once again at the center of the spiral. It is amazing how important things have a way of taking you on long journeys, only to end up bringing you right back to the place where you started.

So it goes like it goes... a decade of film criticism

How’s this for an eye-opener?

Out of sheer coincidence, I reflected late last week on the amount of time and energy I have spent reviewing film on the internet, and much to my surprise, it dawned on me, rather suddenly, that the following Tuesday was to be the tenth – yes, TENTH – anniversary of my first time being published online. The review was for “The Black Cauldron,” and Buena Vista Home Video had just released the Disney cartoon for the first time ever on VHS.