Trainspotting

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The addictions of each of the characters are nothing more than a kind of desperate cry in the face of the uniformity of a decade that, although its montage seems prosperous and pleasant, is nothing more than theatrical and hollow. [Full review in Spanish]

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.

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

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.