FILM

Choice: The critics

Get Shorty John Travolta's performance in Pulp Fiction was just a warm-up for his shimmering turn here as a loan-shark who turns up in LA to hassle movie producer Gene Hackman for a debt and ends up pitching him an idea. Once Danny DeVito, the town's hottest star, comes on board, every mobster in town seems to be burrowing into the movies. The laughs are thin but the movie has a lovely breeziness.

Leaving Las Vegas After a variable few years, the British writer-director Mike Figgis returns with his masterpiece: a gritty, hallucinatory and hopelessly romantic tale of love and doom in Vegas. Nicolas Cage is the suicidal alcoholic who hooks up with Elisabeth Shue, a prostitute determined to take control of her own life.

Trainspotting (left) Lots of energy and heaps of pizazz - but don't go looking for any depth. It's a breathless whirlwind tour of Edinburgh's junkie underbelly, well played by a young cast ranging from the charming to the cartoonishly grotesque.

RYAN GILBEY