Metacritic reviews

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

Keeps you engaged in this story of a memorable anti-hero for our times.

Heroin may be a downer, but Trainspotting definitely takes you up…a series of roaring, provocative, outrageous highs. [26 July 1996, Friday, p.C]

Irresistibly bleak appeal.

It's a disturbing film in the best sense.

Ewan McGregor in a raw, funny, star-making performance.

A must-see.

Artfully ambivalent, Danny Boyle's film, twists with a junkie's logic. It does not preach; it wallows in the pain and, more daringly, in the pleasure.

It uses a colorful vocabulary, it contains a lot of energy, it elevates its miserable heroes to the status of icons (in their own eyes, that is).

Captures the way drug addiction gives structure and purpose to aimless lives, and evokes the breathtaking rapture of a fix. All this and a happy ending, too.