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

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

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

| Jul 5, 2021

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

Brazen, hilarious, disgusting, audacious, altogether fresh.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 26, 2013

An unprecedented and unrivalled piece of entertainment.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 26, 2013

Trainspotting's saving grace is that there's a heck of a lot of entertainment value in this particular form of shallowness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 26, 2013

Trainspotting, buoyed by a great Brit Pop soundtrack and Brian Tufano's agile cinematography, captures the stoned-out, gut-churning experience of hardcore addiction with hallucinogenic acuity.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 26, 2013

The characters are without recognizable virtues, and neither they nor the movie asks us to like them. But they are full of energy and underplayed wit, endlessly picking themselves up off the filthy floor.

| Jun 26, 2013

Trainspotting is a searing pop-art portrait of a lost generation blowing out its brains. As they rail, chuckle, shout and dive into darkness, you're trapped yourself between a bellylaugh and a scream.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 26, 2013

The film is about joy -- in conniving and surviving, in connecting with audiences, in its own fizzy, jizzy style. And that's why, compared with it, most other films look zombified.

| Jun 26, 2013

A cocktail of scuzzy charm, nerve and despair that seduces and repulses in nearly equal proportions. It packs a jolt, all right. But it leaves you with a brutal hangover, too.

| Jun 26, 2013

It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting.

| Original Score: A | Sep 7, 2011

Scabrous, brutal and hip, Trainspotting is a Clockwork Orange for the '90s.

| Jul 7, 2010

This may not have the weight of 'Great Art', but it crystallises youthful disaffection with the verve of the best and brightest pop culture. A sensation.

| Feb 9, 2006

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.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 12, 2002