This major box-office success turns over life to show us an underbelly of society we'd probably rather leave untouched. Workless Scottish teens do drugs, have sex and get violent in between discussing Sean Connery and soccer. They live (and sometimes die) in squalor: an unappetising lifestyle that the film, despite its graphic depiction of it, comes close to glorifying with its gallows wit and savage sophistication. It's well made, but tough to watch, especially if you can't stand needles going into flesh - the sort of film that went down well in the trendy areas its characters would probably hold in the greatest contempt, and less well in the big city suburbs, where the problems it depicts may be closer to home. Ferociously well acted by a now starry-looking but then unknown cast, notably by Ewan McGregor, and by Robert Carlyle as the short-fused psycho you'd least like to bump into at the public bar.

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