Addiction

1996 · Danny Boyle · 93 min · Drama / Dark Comedy

Trainspotting took a subject that should have been unwatchable and made it impossible to look away. Danny Boyle's kinetic direction and Ewan McGregor's breakout performance turned a story about heroin addiction in Edinburgh into something vibrant, funny, and devastating in equal measure. The Scottish dialect is a barrier for some, and the film's refusal to moralize leaves it open to accusations of glamorizing the thing it's depicting. But Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge trusted their audience to see past the energy and recognize the destruction underneath, and three decades later, that trust has been rewarded. It remains one of the most important British films ever made.

2020 · Darius Marder · 120 min · Drama

Sound of Metal is a devastating and immersive character study that uses its sound design to place you inside the experience of hearing loss with startling intimacy. Riz Ahmed delivers a career-best performance as a drummer whose identity is shattered by sudden deafness, and the film's refusal to treat his condition as something to be fixed gives it a moral clarity that most disability narratives lack. The final ten minutes are among the most powerful of any film released in the 2020s.

1996 · David Foster Wallace · 1079 pages · Literary Fiction

Infinite Jest is a monumental, maddening, frequently brilliant novel about addiction and entertainment that rewards patient readers with some of the most perceptive writing about the human condition in contemporary fiction.

2000 · Darren Aronofsky · 102 min · Drama

Requiem for a Dream is a devastating and technically masterful film about addiction that hits harder than almost anything else in the genre. Darren Aronofsky's aggressive visual style and Clint Mansell's unforgettable score combine to create an experience that burrows under your skin and stays there. The four lead performances are exceptional, particularly Ellen Burstyn's portrayal of Sara Goldfarb, which ranks among the finest work of her career. It's a film most people watch once, remember forever, and have to think carefully before watching again.

2024 · Kaveh Akbar · 352 pages · Fiction / Literary

Martyr! announced poet Kaveh Akbar as a major novelist with one of the most celebrated debuts of its year, the story of Cyrus Shams, a newly sober Iranian-American poet obsessed with making his death mean something, whose research into martyrs leads him to a terminally ill artist spending her final days as a museum installation. It's a novel about addiction, grief, and the hunger for significance that manages to be riotously funny on the way to devastating, with sentences that carry a poet's charge. The dream interludes divide readers and the ending leans on a convergence some find too neat. The voice converts nearly everyone.

2018 · Bradley Cooper · 136 min · Musical Romance

A Star Is Born is a deeply felt, impeccably performed musical drama that earns its emotional impact the hard way. Bradley Cooper's directorial debut is confident and raw, Lady Gaga is a revelation, and Shallow became one of the decade's defining movie songs for good reason. The familiar story structure is a real limitation and some viewers will find the relationship dynamics frustrating, but the film's best moments hit in ways that are hard to shake.

2019 · 2 Seasons · HBO · Drama

Euphoria is a show at war with itself, capable of breathtaking television one moment and baffling creative choices the next. Zendaya's performance alone justifies watching, and Season 1 builds a compelling foundation that hooks you fast. But the cracks that appear in Season 2 are real, and they raise legitimate questions about where the show goes from here. It's a series worth watching with the understanding that it might frustrate you as often as it moves you.