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Donnie Darko

Richard Kelly, 2002, USA, 113 mins, 15

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Thu 11 December // 19:30 / Cinema

Tickets: £7/£5/£3

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Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

“Donnie Darko, the first feature by 26-year-old writer-director Richard Kelly, is a wondrous, moodily self-involved piece of work that employs X-Files magic realism to galvanize what might have been a routine tale of suburban teen angst.”    J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, 2001  

 Metaphysical foreboding during the Bush-Dukakis debate in 1988 sends suburban teenager Donnie Darko into the night. Coming to in the wilderness of the local golf course, he returns home to a bizarre disaster: a jet engine has dropped out of the sky and crashed through his bedroom ceiling. And this is just the start, as a familiar world of high school and Halloween parties is complicated by time tunnels, apocalyptic visions and the appearance of a sinister man-size rabbit named Frank.    

Writer-director Richard Kelly’s cult debut made a star of Jake Gyllenhaal (whose sister Maggie also appears as Donnie’s sister Elizabeth) and – perhaps strangest of all – propelled Michael Andrews’s cover version of Mad World to the Christmas number-one slot in the UK Top 40.