Trainspotting: Critic Reviews

...rapid-fire youth-culture freak show: random sex, in-your-face scatology, senseless violence and rampant profanity delivered in haggis-thick brogues.

The movie has been attacked as pro-drug and defended as anti-drug, but actually it is simply pragmatic. It knows that addiction leads to an unmanageable, exhausting, intensely uncomfortable daily routine, and it knows that only two things make it bearable

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.

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.

Hip, brutally honest and humane...

This isn't an examination of the Scottish drug culture from the outside looking in, it's one from the inside looking out.

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.

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.

A pop culture sensation that drew notice to its own urgency and immediacy.

Una historia excepcionalmente narrada.

The most controversial film of the summer is both disturbing and exhilarating in its evocative rendering of a smackhead's chaotic universe.

Danny Boyle's movie achieves -- at least for a while -- the psychedelic high for which it clearly aims, but like the heroin fixes he vividly portrays, his film doesn't have much long-term impact.

Another great movie from the guys who did Shallow Grave.

A rarity: a highly anticipated film that exceeds - and confounds - expectations.

If the essence of Generation X's journey from restless youth to semiproductive maturity could be encapsulated into one film, it would be Trainspotting.

An uncompromising, dark and hilarious film.

a movie that dares to challenge the audience