Donnie Darko

This powerfully affecting science-fiction meditation on parallel universes, time travel and paranoid schizophrenia is a stunningly crafted and hypnotic fantasy drama that opens up intriguing new genre avenues. Completely unclassifiable, director Richard Kelly's intellectually demanding look at surreal destiny has a potent style, dark charm and strange tone all its own. Donnie (a haunting Jake Gyllenhaal) is an introverted student in therapy who keeps having visions of a 6ft-tall rabbit named Frank that tells him the end of the world is imminent and forces him to commit acts of vandalism while sleepwalking. It's during one of Donnie's somnambulistic bouts that a jet engine crashes through the roof of the Darko home, sparking a series of even weirder events. This cosmic parable is part teen-alienation saga, part social satire, with cult appeal stamped over every unpredictable and profoundly wrought frame. The director's cut, released in 2004, has additional material that has divided critics. Some feel that adding to the coherence of the narrative has compromised the teasing mystery of the film, while others have welcomed the chance to see the film as Kelly intended. But in whatever format it is screened, this is a totally original vision that deserves an audience .

"...Richard Kelly, the first-time writer-director, is obviously talented....He sees his characters freshly and clearly, and never reduces them to formulas. In Jake Gyllenhaal, he finds an actor able to suggest an intriguing kind of disturbance..."