Unlike most generational touchstones about alienated young people, Trainspotting has its cake and eats it, too. It gets to be ruthlessly clever about the emptiness of workaday jobs and lifestyle creep while finding the rebellion far more self-destructive.

| Jan 22, 2025

Easy to start, all-consuming, impossible to quit.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 29, 2024

The unsinkable vigor coursing through the veins of Trainspotting leaves no doubt that it intends to come down on the side of life. In its chance-taking, its virtuosity and its ultimate morality, it's an exhilarating film.

| May 1, 2024

Choose Trainspotting... if you think you can take it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 1, 2024

Trainspotting is too morally bland for the ugliness it depicts. It's yet one more movie with the subtle, destructive message that it's not so terrible to do bad things, as long as they're carried off in a stylish, amusing way.

| Apr 30, 2024

It lacks the harrowing quality of a loser's life, but neither does Boyle have the heart to go for all-out farce.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 30, 2024

What saves the movie from being another depressing study of wasted lives is the filmmakers' unblinking, barbed humor, which spikes both modern society and the rebels who reject it. Boyle proves that his storytelling talents in Shallow Crave were no fluke.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 30, 2024

This original spin through this specific moment in time continues to play as a high-energy display of wit, tragedy, and style in a manner that solidified so much for all involved.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 31, 2024

The film resists a moralized discussion of drug use to instead presents a story whose ugly, darkly comic details pulse with Boyle's kinetic touch.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 2, 2022

The screenplay by John Hodge has this incredibly intoxicating eloquence to it, and despite being aimless addicts, most of the characters in this film have such strong personalities, it just makes them stand out.

| Original Score: 8.3/10 | Aug 14, 2021

I've seen it in all formats -- at the movies, on a VCR, on a DVD, streaming -- and it still fills me with a giddy appreciation for its director Danny Boyle's frisky energy, wit, and agility.

| Jul 20, 2021

The film finds pitch-black humor, horror, tragedy, and violence in a series of asides and digressions.

| Jul 5, 2021

Trainspotting gives insight into the rationale of an addict and even sympathizes with them in some ways. But viewers are also sucked in to the terrifying and surreal lows of withdrawal, as well as the real life consequences of addiction.

| Apr 1, 2020

As in his first film, Shallow Grave, Boyle's up-your-nose style of filmmaking is a ghoulish hoot.

| Oct 25, 2019

Like a 20th-century magical realist version of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy narrated by a lad from Edinburgh hooked on skag.

| May 1, 2019

Like the work of some sort of maverick theatre troupe, it's all carried off with a real concentric, anarchic verve.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2018

Trainspotting is a remarkable film.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 23, 2017

What's interesting, viewing the film now, is how it manages to be both inarguably of its time, the mid 90s, but also has not dated nearly as badly as most youth culture movies tend to.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 16, 2017

Trainspotting is supercharged with sulphurous humour and brutal recklessness: it charges at you like Ewan McGregor's Renton sprinting from store detectives in the opening sequence.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 12, 2017

A showy balancing act.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 5, 2016