7.5/10
SLP didn't look particularly great from the thousands of trailers and ads that were crammed down my throat for seemingly the past month or two. The cynic in me has a knee-jerk reaction to those movies Hollywood loves featuring beautiful people whose illnesses are only just so to make them quirky and endearing, as opposed to ugly and offensive. But all things considered, it's a good movie, and it connects emotionally thanks in no small part to Cooper and Lawrence, who are both on the top of their game (although I didn't think Cooper was that amazing. Ahead of Phoenix? No thanks). Robert De Niro was also excellent - no matter how much crap he's been in the last decade, his performance is a reminder of just how good he is.
I found the movie took a turn for the worse right around the "Eagles game" scene (I won't say more for spoilers) - at that point the events lost a bit of their naturalism and started to feel more scripted, with a last-minute plot point shoehorned in to create a false sense of drama. Comparing this to David O. Russell's previous The Fighter, I don't get the sense that he has fully mastered subtlety, but it's a big improvement.
One visual complaint - what the hell was with the sometimes-swoopy camera? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
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