All Critics (60)
|
Top Critics (17)
|
Fresh (56)
|
Rotten (6)
|
DVD (29)
THE experience of watching Trainspotting -- the electric, nasty and slick descent into the milieu of young Scottish junkies -- is a little like speeding through the digestive tract of some voracious beast.
Trainspotting is a singular sensation, a visionary knockout spiked with insight, wild invention and outrageous wit.
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.
It would be pushing it to call Trainspotting a serious work of art or a major statement about anything, but as an edgy, artful piece of entertainment it beats any Hollywood release of the summer by miles.
For better or worse, sometimes strictly for the sake of shock value, the stylish irreverence of "Trainspotting" mimics that drug high and delivers its own potent kick.
This isn't an examination of the Scottish drug culture from the outside looking in, it's one from the inside looking out.
Time has been exceedingly kind to Danny Boyle's excellent breakthrough film and Lionsgate has done a great job preserving it on Blu-ray.
Graphic look into heroin addiction. Not for kids.
Trainspotting is a thoroughly shitty movie, which isn't to say it's a bad one.
Though dark in tone and the bulk of the humor is blacker than a raven's wing at midnight, Boyle's sense of humanity persistently creeps in around the edges.
Among its deeper merits is that it proves a movie doesn't have to be mean to be fresh.
Full of repugnant junkies so unpleasant that I was hoping they'd all OD just so I could escape this torture test.
Trainspotting will have to go down in the annals as one of the great anti-heroin films of all time -- better than Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm, and on a par with Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, maybe even better!
Put simply, Trainspotting is one of those films that gets the mixture just right. The dialogue, the music, the performances, the direction, the production values, the humor, the shock-value.
Danny Boyle's Trainspotting is a blast of ice-cold water across a sweaty brow; it's a lively, vibrant and pulsatingly addictive movie.
It's as if Boyle entered the mind of a junkie, ripped out the catacombs of hallucination and poured them whole onto celluloid.
A pop culture sensation that drew notice to its own urgency and immediacy.
Una historia excepcionalmente narrada.
More Critic Reviews
Top Critic
