Silver Linings Playbook

Silver Linings Playbook is a romantic comedy about two bipolar screw-ups trying to win a dance competition. Chris Tucker is in a supporting role. It should be unwatchable. But in the sure hands of America’s most effervescent humanist director, David O. Russell, it’s unmissable.

Like The Fighter and Flirting with Disaster, Russell's subject is a chaotic family. Pat (Cooper) is the prodigal son returning home after a spell in an asylum; Pat Sr (De Niro) is a gambling-nut barred from his local football team’s ground for going postal on opposing fans; and poor mum Dolores (Weever) holds everything together with crab-based game-watching snacks.

Russell’s genius is that he can spin the most threadbare of scenarios into screwball gold. When Pat is introduced to Tiffany (Lawrence), who’s recently widowed, the director’s idea of meeting cute involves gags about her dead spouse and subsequent nymphomania. This is cinema at its most alive, with frantic zooms and breakneck edits adding fizz to a genre that had long lost its sparkle. [Jamie Dunn]