Dark City (1998)

Alex Proyas made the darkest and best-looking of the reality-is-fake films: a noir city where the sun never rises and a man cannot trust a single memory of his own past. It reached theaters a year before The Matrix, did poorly at the box office, and some of its sets were later used to shoot scenes of the Wachowskis' film. Seek out the director's cut. It removes the explanatory voice-over that was added to the opening and lets the mystery unfold as intended, which makes a real difference to a film built on not knowing. Of everything here, it is the purest version of the identity panic that runs through the whole list, and the one most overdue for rediscovery.