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It hasn’t aged very well (how could it, really?), but back in 1996, director Danny Boyle‘s alternately harrowing and hilarious adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s underground novel chronicling the plight of young Scottish heroin addicts was just about the coolest damn movie since Pulp Fiction. Ewan McGregor skyrocketed to super-stardom as Renton, the junkie hustler looking for a way out of his dead-end existence, which involves surreal plunges into toilets set to the music of Brian Eno and sweaty one-night-stands with underage schoolgirls. Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Kevin McKidd all put in strong work as his ne’er-do-well mates, but it’s Robert Carlyle who steals the show with his furious, frightening performance (reminiscent of a young Gary Oldman) as the completely psychopathic Begbie. Trainspotting is ballsy, rough-and-tumble and fiercely creative cinema — Boyle has gone on to make other great films but none have felt as brilliantly alive as this one. Both oddly and appropriately enough, co-stars Kelly MacDonald, Shirley Henderson and Peter Mullan all went on to play roles in the Harry Potter series.
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