Last night's Oscar entry was To Leslie, the latest in a long uneven line of addiction dramas. What  a lot of these films get wrong I think is a focus on the behaviour of the drunk (or junkie) often ham-fisted, at the expense of the motivation. Lost Weekend was quite good and gritty for its time. I felt a writer's despair at confronting the blank page. Leaving Las Vegas was embarrassing. Blank stares as placeholders for disappointment or pain or cowardice become cliches that lose their power with repeated exposure. What To Leslie gets so right in the performance of Andrea Riseborough is how intertwined her downfall is to her persona. The seeds of her destruction are buried deep within her and are sown in spades when nourished by a lottery win. The world is too much for her and she is too much for the world. Something has to give. When she falls off the ledge, again and again...it feels as inevitable as gravity.