Critic Reviews
| 80 |
Chicago Reader
Staff(Not Credited)
It's MTV meets Merchant-Ivory, at once manneristic, hallucinatory, and exhilarating.
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| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A blast of manic energy in the form of a film.
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| 70 |
Variety
Brendan Kelly
The Acid House makes "Trainspotting" look like a mild-mannered youth comedy.
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| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
A virulent but thoroughly entertaining trilogy of tales about the besieged lower classes of Edinburgh, ripe with vulgarity, self-loathing, violence and economic disorder.
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| 70 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Tasha Robinson
The Acid House comes across as a shadow of "Trainspotting," albeit a vibrant, noisy, frantic shadow.
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| 63 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
There are flashes of excitement in this film, mostly from the verbal play and sulphurous humour of Welsh's perspective, but there's a lot that makes you wonder why you're sitting through it.
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| 60 |
Village Voice
There's so little leavening humor here, and so much physical and emotional violence visited upon the already abject, that the film seems as pointless as the wasted lives it purports to examine.
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| 60 |
TV Guide
God moves in mysterious -- some might say positively spiteful -- ways in this trio of scabrous tales adapted from short stories by "Trainspotting's" Irvine Welsh.
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| 60 |
The New York Times
With a cackling nihilistic glee, the movie rubs our faces in the stinking, screaming muck of raw human appetite and insists that that's all there is.
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| 58 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
It's not the direction that feels flaccid in this film. Surprisingly, it's the stories themselves, which provide a bit of a giggle but little else.
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| 50 |
LA Weekly
Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.
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| 50 |
San Francisco Examiner
It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth.
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| 40 |
Austin Chronicle
A mess, albeit one with occasional flashes of brilliance.
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| 40 |
Film Threat
Over all, the short stories never gel together or create a unified whole.
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| 25 |
Entertainment Weekly
Three stories by the guy who wrote Trainspotting, banged and smashed into a film by Paul McGuigan with none of Trainspotting's charm and all its grotesquerie.
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