A love story like no other, Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas is a bleak, mesmerizing rhapsody of self-destruction, defiantly uninterested in peddling Hollywood-style uplift.

This movie was like watching a car crash in slow motion. You knew there was going to be a crash, but I just wished it would just happen already, and not have spent two hours getting to the impact.

Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places no movie about an alcoholic has gone before.

Cage and Shue deliver impressive, dedicated performances, and Figgis narrowly avoids letting the film fall into anything too mawkish or exploitative.