Critics reviews

It’s a beautiful movie, but it’s pitch black in tone and it watches its own hero kill himself with a sort of detached indifference. His decision was made before we met him, and I’d argue that no one learns much or grows during the story.

For all Ms. Shue's warmth, in the kind of gutsy, unflinching role that often goes to Jennifer Jason Leigh, "Leaving Las Vegas" never rings entirely true as a bleak love story... Mr. Cage digs deep to find his character's inner demons while also capturing the riotous energy of his outward charm. The film would seem vastly more sordid without his irrepressible good humor.

If the film lacks the depth and structural sophistication of, say, The Lost Weekend (it was shot fast, with Declan Quinn's saturated Super-16 photography blown up, which may explain its kinetic buzz), it certainly has the courage of its convictions.

Mike Figgis‘ “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995) is not a love story, although it feels like one, but a story about two desperate people using love as a form of prayer and a last resort against their pain. It is also a sad, trembling portrait of the final stages of alcoholism. Those who found it too extreme were simply lucky enough never to have arrived there themselves.

Emotionally draining, the graphic depictions of physical abuse are tempered by the delicate moments of doomed love. Powerful and visceral, this is the ultimate sobering experience.

Leaving Las Vegas hits you like a breath of fresh air coupled with a 100-proof chaser. The movie is an amazing, bracing, funny, audacious, tender, and sobering piece of filmmaking. Few movies have ever dared to be this remorseless in their portraits of addiction -- in this case, alcoholism

The film’s bleak final scenes are hard to endure and impossible to shake. You can’t take your eyes off these actors... Is the film a metaphor for doomed romance in an age of AIDS and lethal addiction? Cage and Shue make it something more visceral and immediate: a cry from the heart.

“Leaving Las Vegas” is one of the bleakest romances in memory, a totally despairing film, complete with a wrenchingly explicit scene of anal rape, that is shrouded in a miasma of hopelessness. If this is what great romance means, audiences may feel like settling for whatever’s in second place.