This was completely brilliant and I have no doubt in my mind it's going to be a classic in the same vein as Jerry Maguire ten years down the line. I can't imagine anyone disliking this movie for any reason, it's pretty much flawless and everyone who watches it will be able to relate. All the performances are perfection. Jennifer Lawrence is winning the Oscar, hands down and if she doesn't it's going to be one of the biggest upsets ever. She takes a character who normally wouldn't be very likable and turns in a scene stealing, brilliant performance. This girl barely cracks a smile during the whole movie and you are on her side at all times. It was a BRILLIANT performance and it better fucking be rewarded. Robert DeNero was also Oscar worthy. He was incredible. Brandley Cooper was wonderful, as was Jacki Weaver as well. The movie is very funny and ridiculously touching. One of the best movies of the year and I can't wait for everyone here to be able to see it.

10/10

I saw this back in June and agree that it is fantastic. Bradley Cooper has never been better and Robert DeNiro is the best he's been in years, but Jennifer Lawrence steals the show with a soulful and completely mesmerizing performance. A huge crowd-pleaser too. This is a must see. A

What if we kind of hate Jerry Maguire?

I'm not a huge fan of it, I only gave it a 7/10 I believe but it's been such a long time since I've seen it. They're just similar in tone.

Might just be the best film so far this year. Cooper and Lawrence give career-best performances here and the former really should not be overlooked come Oscar time (we all know Lawrence is going nominated). This is also DeNiro's best performance since at least Meet the Parents. This film can be easily viewed side-by-side with The Fighter for how well O'Russell captures family dynamics in both of these films. Though there are a lot of intense scenes throughout, there are just as many scenes to laugh at and have a good time with. Pat and Tiffany's chemistry works so well I believe, and makes the film stand out, because we usually never see two characters interact like this given their nature and move the film along so well.

Hopefully this hits it big at the Oscars.

LOVED it. Flat out loved it. Lawrence is a knock-out, but the movie belongs just as much to Cooper as it does to her.

Seeing this at another free screening Monday!

David O. Russell has long established himself as a reliable purveyor of Hollywood quirk. His films, whatever their faults, have tended to err on the side of idiosyncratic, which has the advantage of distinguishing what are essentially traditional dramas and dramatic comedies from the faceless pack to which they otherwise belong. But the quirks are always merely window dressing: Russell isn't an especially weird filmmaker and not one of his films, including the self-consciously oddball I Heart Huckabees, diverges far from the safety net of convention. That's why, in a sense, 2010's The Fighter seemed like a kind of coming-out party for Russell: It appeared at last to acknowledge a desire to deliver routine pleasures that had at least implicitly guided all of his films to date, and it did so while abandoning any pretense of art-house eccentricity. It was, rather explicitly in fact, Russell's de facto prestige picture, a classical drama centered around three transformative performances and a vaguely inspirational story; that it went on to secure a grand total of seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture and one for Best Director, clearly validated the decision to embrace a populist approach, and one doubts that from this point forward there's any turning back for Russell.


This contextual narrative is relevant because Silver Linings Playbook, Russell's latest ensemble dramatic comedy, seems both the culmination of a career built around quirk and, perhaps more importantly, the next logical step forward for a director whose taste for illustrious decoration has only just been whetted. It has been precisely calibrated—with what must have been a remarkable degree of foresight and savvy—to generate maximal goodwill, and every effort has been undertaken to make each facet of its design broadly and irresistibly appealing. What it gets right on paper is immediately apparent: Casting hot-ticket stars against type as crestfallen romantics struggling to cope with mental illness provides two attractive but ostensibly vacuous mainstream celebrities (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) the enviable opportunity to prove their worth with conspicuously "revelatory" performances; meanwhile, the fundamental seriousness of their characters' respective arcs, with Cooper hoping to control the outbursts caused by his bipolar disorder and Lawrence attempting to overcome her grief over her husband's recent death, raise the emotional stakes considerably, elevating largely light material from rote comedy to overtly "adult" drama.


And Cooper and Lawrence, for their part, do their best to contend with the screenplay's many contrivances, selling themselves as realistically afflicted and, on occasion, as (mostly) fully realized human beings. The couple's protracted conversations are pretty obviously intended by design to serve as the film's dramatic pulse, throbbing with unspoken sexual and romantic tension and coursing through with the apparently uncontrollable vitality of their exciting but vaguely dangerous instability. That the star-crossed love story at the center of the film is drawn between two characters defined by their respective mental illnesses is clearly its high-concept selling point, and insofar as it single-handedly transforms an otherwise entirely conventional screwball-comedy pairing into something at least marginally novel, if not exactly original, the setup alone qualifies as quintessential Russellian quirk in action. The brand of safe, marketable mental illness brandished by the screenplay as a dramatically meaty "issue"—the kind that affects the well-being of attractive individuals without significantly reducing their attractiveness to us except in a superficial, "fixable" way—furnishes Silver Linings Playbook with the requisite passive liberalism of any well-meaning prestige picture, making it "about" something meaningful without it having to put in the work of actually meaning anything.


The pieces brought into play here, of course, are enormously seductive, and it's not hard to see why so many have been taken in by the film's wide-eyed charm. But when one stops to consider how irksomely on the nose so much of this is (its affected earnestness, its exploitative issue-mongering), the qualities which intend to most readily ingratiate the film with us begin to appear perceptibly disingenuous and false. A scene in which Cooper's steadily recovering Pat Solitano ill-advisedly ventures to a Philadelphia Eagles game at the behest of his superstitious father is illuminating: When a group of casually racist football fans incite a spontaneous brawl in the stadium parking lot, Solitano's violent outburst and subsequent arrest confirm that the band of fighters appear only as a function of a hackneyed script, their presence (and, furthermore, the trip to the game itself) reduced in an instant to simplistic icons needed to get the plot from point A to point B.


This kind of lazy writing characterizes Silver Linings Playbook, which shoehorns one contrivance after another into a narrative lacking any sense of organic movement or rhythm. Words and actions and even entire characters at the periphery of the story are motivated solely by a desire to keep things moving forward. Its machinations are ever apparent, lifted in most cases from, ahem, the Generic Hollywood Rom-Com Playbook: lies are told and then dramatically revealed, fights are had and then hurriedly resolved, and the climax of the film, remarkably, hinges on a ridiculous bet made for no reason other than to add a modicum of tension to an event in which we'd otherwise not be invested. Chris Tucker shows up as the lead's token black friend and, sure enough, he teaches the white folks to dance with soul (incredibly, the actual word he uses in that context). Even a one-dimensional police officer—apparently the only one in Philadelphia—instantly appears whenever and wherever the script's whim's dictate, always conveniently on duty and in uniform.


That all of this is meant to not only be perfectly credible, but also somehow compelling makes it, in short, the work of a sloppy filmmaker. But as always with Russell, the faults are merely swept under the all-encompassing rug of quirk—a calculated effort to pass off a mundane dramatic comedy as something more idiosyncratic and strange than it really is. That's why serious mental-health issues are reduced to boxes to be checked off on the screenplay's journey to the expected resolution; the fact that real-life mental illness is significantly more serious and debilitating than a wacky character trait conquered by wherewithal and good vibrations is irrelevant to a film that couldn't care less about the particulars of reality. A serious-minded worldview and a nuanced engagement with complicated issues doesn't win you Oscars; a touching late-period Robert De Niro performance and an underlying message of hope, on the other hand, very likely do.

Why you are just posting Slant's review in here?

i will post filmfreakcentral's review too, but only if it's negative.

Any particular reason you're hating on this movie already, since I'm 100% positive you haven't seen it? It's harmless.

It should be deleted.

I think my expectations were too high but I liked it. If any performance is Oscar worthy I think it's Robert DeNiro imo. Hope Cooper gets a nomination too. Lawrence is good but it doesn't feel like an Oscar winning performance to me but idk.

I'm a bit confused by all of the (extremely) high praise?

Don't get me wrong, I liked it. It's perfectly fine, formulaic, middlebrow stuff. But one of the best of the year? There's not a single exceptional thing about this. I mean, Jennifer Lawrence is pretty great (and SMOKIN' hot... all those scenes with her in yoga pants...) and it's funny and well-written and all that, but, at its heart, this is simply a crowd-pleasing romcom with crazy good-looking people instead of normal good-looking people.

I guess it gets points for making Chris Tucker not annoying, at least.

I saw it again and it held up pretty great. I still stand by that this movie is going to be a classic.

This is a solid film, but perhaps not deserving of the glowing critical reception it has received. On the surface, the choice to set a conventional movie-magic tale of redemption through romance in a modern suburbia populated by anxious, wage-earning sports fans generates a potent charge, and the stars deliver spirited performances, including the gorgeous and magnetic Jennifer Lawrence, who steals scene after scene and drives the film even more than headliner Bradley Cooper (though he, too, is fine and shows a new side of himself here). In the end, though, the film can't escape its own conventionality: despite a top-notch cast firing on each cylinder they have and David O. Russell's confident direction (few capture the rapid pace of modern life with as much focus and hotheaded pleasure), the third act is a shade too comfortable and routine. It is pleasing in the way a decent '90s Meg Ryan film is pleasing, but one can't help but wish this writer/director and this cast delivered more: a more insightful exploration of the protagonist's personality disorder, perhaps, or a more nuanced and realistic depiction of aching individuals transcending grief and regret in order to heal and move forward. Russell's phenomenal previous film, The Fighter, is a much more complex and memorable trip through similar territory. This, in my estimation, is a satisfying and crisp, but minor entry to his oeuvre.

B+

Every year or so since the 2000s started, there's a film with comedy/drama elements that seems to capture the hearts of viewers and critics alike: The Descendants in 2011, Up in the Air in 2009, Juno in 2007, Little Miss Sunshine in 2006, Sideways in 2004, Lost in Translation in 2003.

Before anyone says "[above film] is way better than Silver Linings Playbook", I'm not saying anything about quality.

If I had not just been bowled over by Lincoln a week ago, this would easily be my #1 movie of the year (so far). Silver Linings Playbook is an incredibly vibrant, life-affirming and funny romantic comedy filled with tremendous acting and a sure-handed approach from writer/director David O. Russell. It jumps all over the place from scene to scene, but like the manic energy of Pat and Tiffany, this approach just fits perfectly. In some ways, the film's depiction of a troubled but loving family feels like a continuation of his work from The Fighter, although this film is certainly more of an overt comedy. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are both tremendous here; Cooper displays some serious acting chops I'm not sure anyone was even aware of before, and Lawrence (quickly on her way to taking over Hollywood before the age of 25) is vivacious, withdrawn, and sexy all at once. Robert De Niro finally acts instead of sleepwalking through a role, while Jacki Weaver is perfectly earthy. It's a movie about two messed up people who connect, but the self-consciously quirky and over-the-top tics you might come to expect with that aren't here. It's fantastic. A

I love the use of "What Is and What Should Never Be" in this film.

Saw this and Lincoln on back to back days.

This edged out Lincoln.

A! Loved it.

Saw this a second time today. Still wonderful.

Saw this again last night. I honestly think this deserves to win the Best Ensemble SAG award, all around fantastic performances. I was a little iffy about Lawrence the first time I saw it but the scene where she sees Nikki at the competition is just great acting.

Wow - - what a great movie!

...and it was so, so close to being incredible...

...just a slightly bloated middle section blunted the cascading rhythms generated by this very sharp film. This otherwise exceptionally true told tale seemed to especially lose track of Bradley Cooper's character just past the halfway mark...

...however these are mere greedy wishes for perfection. Silver Linings Playbook is great! Jennifer Lawrence is such a star now. And I was blown away when I caught on to the rare appearance by Chris Tucker - only his third movie role in the past 15 years and it's a tiny gem! Bradley Cooper did fine, except where the script let him down as noted above. + De Niro!

...while director David O. Russell has yet to return to the rare altitude he achieved with his back-to-back masterpieces Three Kings & I ♥ Huckabees, he's definitely soaring in Silver Linings Playbook.


17 out of 5.