Dark City (1998)

The movie opens with a man 'awakening' in a bath tub. He is disoriented and lacks memory of who he is or what he is doing there. He dresses and on his way into other rooms gets a phone call from Dr. Schreber (Keifer Sutherland), telling him to leave before the men searching for him get there. After receiving this phone call he sees the body of the dead prostitute lying next to the bed. he follows the advice and heads out, taking the stairs as he sees that the elevator is just arriving at his floor. In the lobby, the man working the desk calls him Murdoch, which he assumes must be his name. Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) goes to recover his wallet from the automat that the desk clerk told him about.
Murdoch eventually ends up back at his house, where meets his wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly) for the first time. She thinks they have been married for years but have been apart after she had an affair which he discovered three weeks earlier.
Meanwhile, Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt) has just taken over the murder investigation from Detective Walenski (Colin Friels) looking into the murder of six prostitutes. It is revealed that Walenski was pulled off the case because he has gone crazy talking about the men doing experiments on everyone, and drawing crazy patterns all over the walls and ceiling of his study.
In the third perspective we see Dr. Schreber's dealings with the strangers, as he calls them. They turn out to be a race of insect like creatures experimenting on the humans to try and find what Schreber calls the soul so that the strangers can utilize in their attempt to stem the dying off of their own race.
Murdoch turns out to be the one human who can do this thing called the tuning, which is a form of telekinesis. He uses it sparingly through most of the movie, but quite considerably towards the end. Along the way, Bumstead is slowly becoming convinced that Murdoch is not the murderer and eventually comes to believe what Walenski did, that nothing is what it seems that there is a conspiracy controlling every aspect of the city.
Eventually it is showdown time, and Schreber tricks the strangers and imprints Murdoch with a life time's worth of memories that explain who the strangers are and what they want, plus teach Murdoch how to use the tuning, just in time for him to have the big showdown with the head honcho for the strangers, Mr. Book (Ian Richardson).
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This movie may have come out eight years ago, but it was new to me. I forget the conversation that precipitated this film coming up, but I would have never thought of this on my own. Once I got the movie box in my hot little hands, I realized that I had tried to watch this a number of years ago, sometime before I moved to Minnesota, sometime when I still showed up at friend's houses to find them in the middle of movies. I tried to make sense of what was going on, and just thought that it looked totally stupid.
Finally watching this, it was easy to recall what made this movie look "stupid", it really comes down to three things - Keifer Sutherland, the strangers, William Hurt / Jennifer Connelly. First, Sutherland's character in this film has this really annoying speaking style, very breathy and very choppy. Second, the strangers look like Hellraiser, meets the Matrix, meets Clockwork Orange, don't pretend you don't know what I mean. Third is the way that Hurt and Connelly's characters react to everything so understated that they don't seem to have any passion at all during the majority of the movie.
But, there were things that I didn't think were stupid, like Sewell's portrayal of the protagonist. I liked the noir sci-fi thing as well; it had that 1940s meets the 22nd century vibe going on. I also liked that the protagonist doesn't feel he has to kill every alien to win - sure some die but it's in defending himself.
If you're a big sci-fi fan, I would recommend this film to you, but suspect that like the person who recommended it to me that you already saw it a long time ago. Which might explain her nostalgia a bit, because only in the 90s could the hair-dos sported by Sutherland and Sewell have been considered acceptable, but it takes seeing it out of context to really point that out.