My ticket stub says that I saw Silver Linings Playbook but it can't be the same film everyone else has seen. It just can't be. This one was supposed to be charming, enjoyable, fun even. It won the TIFF Audience Award. It was supposed to have great characters. Cooper and Lawrence were supposed to have given wonderful performances. DeNiro, it was said, was back. Jackie Weaver, wait, was she in this?

The film I saw was bland and boring. I checked my watch when I found myself engaged: it was 8:50. The film started at 7pm.
So I had plenty of time to just kind of watch the film go by and notice stuff. I imagined the checklist of things…

What a triumph. Worthy of all the praise it has been getting and then some.

I was baffled by how moved I was by this film. I generally do not like this type of 'boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love against all odds' storyline. And even though this is essentially just that, there is so much more to it.

This is a character driven piece and we are given a host of superbly written protagonists, who are for the better part of the film, their own antagonists. It is their nature that makes this film so intriguing and the slowly developing relationships and character arcs so compelling and refreshingly original. These are not characters easy to identify…

I can’t remember the last time I was quite so apathetic towards a film.

David O. Russell’s awards bothering movie is perfectly decent, but is it anything more than that? For me the answer is a disappointing no. It’s easy to see why it attracted such attention during awards season as it deals with mental illness (a voter’s favourite) whilst wrapping it up in the safe comforting embrace of a feel-good romantic-drama. Even the loud, showy performances seem carefully engineered to play into the hands of voters.

Despite the spiky central relationship between the bipolar Pat and depressed slutty widow, Tiffany, this is a crushingly conventional story that never strays from the well worn romantic-comedy formula. Whilst it might subvert…

Love can make us all a little crazy.
Unless you're already a little crazy.
In that case, maybe love provides a bit of a silver lining, and we can all use a bit of that now can't we?

God, I loved this film. I loved everything about it. Everything was just so right on the nose from the performances to the writing to the atmosphere to the soundtrack to...I just loved it. Just blew me away.

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence both did a tremendous job in their roles, especially Lawrence who I'm really pulling for to win that Oscar. You feel every single emotion they display from the looks they give and they way they speak alone. Together they…

No film this year took me by bigger surprise than Silver Linings Playbook, a dazzling romantic comedy featuring the type of dysfunctional people that reside in David O. Russell's wheelhouse as a filmmaker. Not since Three Kings and Flirting With Disaster has he been so in tune with his strengths, and it resulted in what might be his crowning achievement.

As much as both The Fighter and I Heart Huckabees are enormously appreciated by most people, I found each of them highly uneven and severely overrated. No doubt they have good things about them, but they definitely lack that vintage Russell feel that his earlier work possesses. Being that he hasn't made a film I have liked since 1999, it's…

Silver Linings Playbook is the rare romantic comedy that I can tolerate. The dialogue is witty, and the actors, Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro especially, lift the material up.
Bradley Cooper plays a thirty-something teacher who beats up the man who cheated on his wife, and is returning home from a mental hospital after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Cooper plays the craziness of this man well, bringing an energy to the role that I rarely see him do.
DeNiro plays his father, who's extremely superstitious and gambles on his beloved Philadelphia Eagles. He frequently tries to connect with his son, and to get him involved with the Sunday football rituals.
But Cooper's character eventually meets Jennifer Lawrence's, who is…

Ah, what the hell... I'm giving this a solid 4/5 this time. Silver Linings Playbook isn't the movie most people think it'll be. I mean, hey... it's a football movie, a comedy, a dance movie, a (demented) romance. And it's got Robert De Niro in one of his funniest and most lovable roles.

Pat (Cooper) is just out of a mental institution, has moved in with his parents, and is planning on winning back his wife and job. Just read some books and work out a lot - that'll do it, right? In the process, he meets Tiffany (Lawrence), who seems to be just as screwed up as he is... in fact, they initially bond by sharing their medication stories.…