| 100 |
Entertainment Weekly
It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting.
|
| 100 |
Film.com
Keith Simanton
Two of the fastest, most involving hours in recent film.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
Heroin may be a downer, but Trainspotting definitely takes you up…a series of roaring, provocative, outrageous highs. [26 July 1996, Friday, p.C]
|
| 100 |
Film.com
Susan Rathke
Darkly humorous, intensely graphic.
|
| 100 |
San Francisco Examiner
Barry Walters
Extraordinary, entertaining cinema.
|
| 100 |
Film.com
Shannon Gee
Keeps you engaged in this story of a memorable anti-hero for our times.
|
| 100 |
Salon.com
The most original, daring, thrilling movie to be released this year, Trainspotting is one of those occasional, astonishing triumphs of risk and imagination that gets you excited about what smart people, pushing themselves and the medium, can accomplish in the movies.
|
| 100 |
Slate
Michael Wood
A desolate, fast, funny, scary film, and it takes more risks than any recent film.
|
| 90 |
Time
The film is about joy--in conniving and surviving, in connecting with audiences, in its own fizzy, jizzy style.
|
| 90 |
Variety
Scabrous, brutal and hip, Trainspotting is a "Clockwork Orange" for the '90s.
|
| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
Exuberant and pitiless, profane yet eloquent, flush with the ability to create laughter out of unspeakable situations, Trainspotting is a drop-dead look at a dead-end lifestyle that has all the strength of its considerable contradictions.
|
| 90 |
TNT RoughCut
Jason Puskar
Irresistibly bleak appeal.
|
| 89 |
Austin Chronicle
The on-target performances, along with the unceasing barrage of popular music and daring narrative gambles, combine to make Trainspotting one of the grand movie rushes of 1996.
|
| 88 |
USA Today
A movie that rudely flings feces at the breakfast table isn't for everyone.
|
| 88 |
ReelViews
There's nothing new or unique about the story, but it is presented in a manner that reinforces its immediacy and impact.
|
| 88 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
A little like speeding through the digestive tract of some voracious beast. There's bite, acid, digestive churning and an expulsive conclusion. If the metaphor seems unsavoury, well, wait until you see the film.
|
| 87 |
Mr. Showbiz
It's a disturbing film in the best sense.
|
| 80 |
Film.com
Ewan McGregor in a raw, funny, star-making performance.
|
| 80 |
Chicago Reader
A must-see.
|
| 80 |
Film.com
A surprisingly vital film.
|
| 80 |
Newsweek
John Leland
Artfully ambivalent, Danny Boyle's film, twists with a junkie's logic. It does not preach; it wallows in the pain and, more daringly, in the pleasure.
|
| 80 |
Dallas Observer
Arnold Wayne Jones
Creates a sense of understanding that crystallizes the essence of the drug subculture with startling clarity.
|
| 80 |
The New York Times
The stylish irreverence of Trainspotting mimics that drug high and delivers its own potent kick.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Darkly comic tone of heroin-addiction film sets it apart
|
| 75 |
Baltimore Sun
Isn't a noble story, or even a cautionary one: It just feels pretty painfully real.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
It uses a colorful vocabulary, it contains a lot of energy, it elevates its miserable heroes to the status of icons (in their own eyes, that is).
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
Captures the way drug addiction gives structure and purpose to aimless lives, and evokes the breathtaking rapture of a fix. All this and a happy ending, too.
|
| 50 |
The New Republic
A new voyeurism has arisen in the last two decades or so, and Trainspotting caters to it--an addiction to addiction-watching. [August 19, 1996]
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
The story, such as it is, follows Renton's inconsistent attempts to kick his habit.
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