Vincible. Silver Linings Playbook, Reviewed.

1. She’s a grieving cop’s widow, prone to nymphomania, locked away in a shed behind her parents’ home, profoundly damaged—not broken, but close. He’s a bipolar basket case who nearly beat a man half to death for showering with his wife, the same wife with whom he obsessively wants to reconcile, even as he rocks back and forth in a mental institutions, whispering self-help mantras to himself while punching the wall. (This is a guy who has to psych himself down to go to a football game: “I won’t get in a fight today, I won’t, I won’t.) It’s tough to come up with more unlikely centers of a romantic comedy than Pat and Tiffany, played by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook, a film as unmoored and manic and big-hearted as its lead characters. I’m not sure I’ve seen a romance so imbued with this much danger since Punch-Drunk Love. This movie doesn’t reach that film’s cathartic highs, but it’s based in the same world: This is about lost people finding each other. More »