It is the most boring film ever made -- worse than a documentary.

| Apr 25, 2022

Leaving Las Vegas is a relentless downer -- look at it as a love story for anyone who found The Bridges of Madison County too precious -- but it's worth sticking through for its two lead performances.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 18, 2021

The movie contains career-best performances from Nicolas Cage... and Elisabeth Shue.

| Aug 4, 2020

A love story like no other, Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas is a bleak, mesmerizing rhapsody of self-destruction, defiantly uninterested in peddling Hollywood-style uplift.

| Feb 23, 2018

This movie was like watching a car crash in slow motion. You knew there was going to be a crash, but I just wished it would just happen already, and not have spent two hours getting to the impact.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 12, 2017

What works, first and foremost, are the two lead performances.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 30, 2017

[Shue's] terrific (and Oscar-nominated), but the movie belongs to Cage whose fierce, uncompromising performance is as serious as a hangover and as jittery as the shakes. You can practically smell the stale reek of his booze-soaked breath.

| Jul 7, 2017

The artistic direction of Figgis keeps it honest and unsentimental.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 13, 2015

[VIDEO ESSAY] "Leaving Las Vegas" (1995) is a remarkably potent romantic drama that permanently altered the careers of many of the people involved in its creation.

| Original Score: A | Sep 7, 2013

Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places no movie about an alcoholic has gone before.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 7, 2011

Figgis puts a desperate drunk front and center and demands we deal with him and the Jungian shadow he casts. [Blu-ray]

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 19, 2011

We're not talking high, morally instructive tragedy here, just a hard lesson in postmodernist outlawry and its sad little anarchies.

| Sep 19, 2008

Figgis' film, one of the few to show the sleazy flip-side of the glossy city of Las Vega, offers an unblinking portrayal of alcoholism.

| Sep 19, 2008

The film pulls no punches, takes no prisoners and flies in the face of feel-good pictures.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2008

It's a relief when so dark a film refuses to preach, trusting the viewer to draw his own conclusions about the roots of America's self-destructive funk.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 11, 2008

The plot goes nowhere, but under the pornographic circumstances Figgis, Cage, and Shue all do fine jobs.

| Feb 11, 2008

Figgis presents disintegration as a state of grace.

| Original Score: A | Sep 24, 2007

It certainly has the courage of its convictions.

| Jun 24, 2006

An uncompromising, surprisingly poignant skid-row love story.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jan 23, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 4, 2005