Silver Linings Playbook Reviews
It's a rom-com that succeeds in revitalizing that discredited genre where so many others have failed, injecting it with the grit and emotion of realist drama rather than with amped-up whimsy or social satire or montages of people walking on the beach.
Silver Linings Playbook tells us that happily-ever-after may depend on finding people who coexist with our lunacy, not ones who can lead us out of it. In any case, it's crazy good.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A crazy beaut of a comedy that brims with generosity and manages to circumvent predictability at every turn.
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| Original Score: A
An edgy romantic dramedy that suits our anxious times.
This meaningful film keeps the laughs, giddy anxiousness and warm butterflies from the trailer and sustains it all through two full hours of a love story.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Lawrence, in her most high-low, sad-comic turn yet, is remarkable.
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| Original Score: B
It shouldn't work - there's just too much going on. But it does. Spectacularly. Go see it.
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| Original Score: A
Just about everybody in the cast of David O. Russell's strange and disturbing and deeply romantic new film has the chance to act with a capital A.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
There's nothing wrong with the overrated Jennifer Lawrence that some serious acting lessons couldn't improve. The rest of the actors are pretty much on their own.
For a movie that seems at times to have no idea what it's trying to do, "Silver Linings Playbook" is compulsively watchable.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Sharp of tongue, generous of spirit, Silver Linings Playbook is a jagged, loopy romantic comedy about "crazy" people that insists, deep down, we're all a little nuts.
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| Original Score: A
"The Silver Linings Playbook" defies categorization: it's both comedy and drama, without fitting neatly into either genre.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Some movies are so likable, so naturally charming, that you'll forgive any dopey idea they throw at you.
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| Original Score: 3/4
David O. Russell has pulled off a tricky feat here, finding just the right tone in crafting a romantic comedy whose sweethearts suffer from bipolar disorder and depression.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Silver Linings Playbook isn't perfect - the ending is untidy - but it may just be the year's best comedy.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end.
Tinged with shadows and ignited by Lawrence and Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook raises the bar on romantic comedy. It's crazy good.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's lopsided and spotty, but it's alive in a way that suddenly makes you remember to what degree most Hollywood movies aren't.
With Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell has again recalibrated, and achieved the quirky yet poignant balance of his best early work.
It's Lawrence who knocked me sideways. I loved her in Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games but she's very young - I didn't think she had this kind of deep-toned, layered weirdness in her.
David O. Russell returns to his distinctive brand of neurotic screwball comedy, and like his early features Spanking the Monkey and Flirting With Disaster, this one somersaults giddily from sanity to insanity to sanity again.
'Silver Linings Playbook' is fun, sharp and sometimes moving, but it's not reinventing any kind of wheel.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
A determinedly offbeat romance and rather knowing portrait of self-destructive behavior.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Because of Lawrence, I just can't write off this movie.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Would that every feel-good movie came by its good feelings so honestly.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a strain to care about Pat, and it's impossible to believe in his world.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Silver Linings is consistently entertaining, with its scrappy, well-drawn characters, offbeat humor and indefatigable positive outlook.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The movie doesn't break any thematic ground, and in other hands this same material might have made for an insufferable Katherine Heigl vehicle. But Russell and his cast make it sing - and soar, too.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Dramatic, emotional, even heartbreaking, as well as wickedly funny, it has the gift of going its own way, a complete success from a singular talent.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Cooper's performance meets Lawrence's, beautifully, halfway.
Everything comes together brilliantly in "Silver Linings Playbook"-for the film's crazed but uncrazy lovers; for the filmmaker, David O. Russell, and best of all for lucky us.
No matter how grim it's looking for certain kinds of laughter, as long as there's David O. Russell, things will be OK.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
"Silver Linings Playbook," the exuberant new movie from David O. Russell, does almost everything right.
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| Original Score: 5/5
It's clever and cute and never lets you forget it, winning in spite of how much it insists on it.
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| Original Score: B
I say good for Russell for risking a protagonist who requires some patience and forgiveness.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
"Silver Linings Playbook" is so good, it could almost be a terrific old classic.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Russell pitches the action at a manic, screwball pace, and the cast is more than up to the task, with Cooper and Lawrence attracting and repelling each other with equal dynamism.
"Playbook" walks a tightrope in how it portrays mental illness -- deriving humor out of its characters' actions while demonstrating just how deep-rooted their problems are.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Manic as it might be stylistically, emotionally Silver Linings Playbook maintains too even of a keel.
The acting is sparky and intelligent, with Cooper proving there's more to him than flashy good looks. As for Lawrence, she acts every role like there's a soulful storm raging inside of her.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It's impossible to shake the sense that what felt thrillingly, cohesively alive in the director's earlier movies plays here with more laurel-resting creakiness than go-for-broke verve.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Silver Linings Playbook is a quirky adult romantic comedy that goes beyond the standard rhythms of the genre.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Globe and Mail
Top CriticSilver Linings Playbook is a neurotic ode to family dysfunction and accepting the universal screwup in all of us, which is to say it's maybe the most heartwarming movie you'll ever see about bipolarity.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A head-spinning wonder of a movie about love and pain, reclamation and the totemic power of a National Football League franchise.
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| Original Score: 4/4
With great pacing, a great sense of the moment and some of the most entertaining one-liners you'll find this side of a Coen brothers' film, there's much to like about Silver Linings Playbook.
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| Original Score: A
The performances of these actors are reason enough to go.
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence expand their range in David O. Russell's winning comedy romance about two people struggling to rebuild their lives.
In a script that never lapses into mundane or uninteresting language, the scenes between Pat and Tiffany are sculpted with an almost David Mamet-like sharpness.
