Leaving Las Vegas

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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