Please, if you haven't seen it already, don't bother with the Director's Cut.

If this is what Richard Kelly really wanted to do with the film then I worry about his future projects. It lacked the subtlety and nuance of the original and dealt its message with an iron fist, lest one construct their own meanings I suppose.

Kelly had repeatedly mentioned in interviews, and in the dvd director commentary, that DD is undoubtedly a time travel/tangent universe film, and not an examination of mental illness or hallucination. Fair enough. That was certainly my preferred interpretation. But his decision to spell that out without opportunity for deviation in the Director's Cut just comes across as clumsy and unwieldy. I appreciated the insertion of more content from The Philosophy of Time Travel but there was just too much of it. To the point where it upset the flow of the narrative with the constant intertitles between scenes.

But what really made me choke on this film was the truly painful addition of the Matrixesque graphics during periods of contact between Donnie and Frank. Huh? What's with the scrolling text against the dilating eyeball complete with a subliminal image of Frank superimposed over the pupil??

Spare me.

The only swell of gratification I got from this version was the diegetic inclusion of Voices Carry in an early scene of Donnie in his bedroom.