Leaving Las Vegas (1995) - Drama/Romance (and low-budget film)
Nic Cage fully deserved the Oscar for this but Elizabeth Shue is also sensational, giving an extremely subtle performance that mixes tenderness, worldweariness and vulnerability. None of it would work without Mike Figgis's excellent direction, which adopts an indie aesthetic to capture one man's descent into oblivion and the inability of anyone around them to stop it. The jazzy score is great too.
But this is Cage's film, easily one of the best performances of the decade. Most actors would have played the role with some degree of vanity, as an Oscar drunk who swaggers around the bars (I love Val Kilmer in Tombstone but it's the epitome of that performance). Cage has no vanity as an actor, he looks visibly ill throughout and comes across completely like someone who's helpless and losing control of their mind, body and sense of self. When he's drinking vodka out of the bottle he looks like a man dying of thirst, frantically trying to get some water down his throat.
This is a pretty good compliation of some of the best scenes. Love the contrast between the subtlety of the scene where Cage lowers the bottle as a motorcycle cop pulls level and you see him get more and more impatient in the few seconds before the cop speeds ahead, and the one where he flips the table after he can't get a drink.
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