Leaving Las Vegas

Director: Mike Figgis

1995 / 112min / 35mm

In Las Vegas on a mission to drink himself into the afterlife, recently unemployed alcoholic screenwriter Nicolas Cage finds a measure of succor in his relationship with sympathetic sex worker Elisabeth Shue—styled by Vivienne Westwood—in Figgis’s down-and-dirty character study. The world occupied by Cage and Shue’s characters is anything but glitzy, but as costumed by Laura Goldsmith, both have a glum, slightly trashy beauty that’s entirely appropriate to a film about finding grace in the gutter.