Joy

Yikes. Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle director David O. Russell reassembles much of his stock company (Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro) and most of his stock mannerisms (Scorsese-ian camera moves and song cues, nonsensical exuberance) for this extremely loose biopic about the inventor of the Miracle Mop, but the results have never been this sloppy. Joy is all forced smiles—it feels like an album made by a band that should have broken up years ago, just a rambling and incoherent series of unmotivated actions and overemphatic gestures. Everyone gets points for gusto, especially Lawrence as a single mother holding together her wacky family while navigating a booby-trapped business world, but every scene feels like an undirected rehearsal, so the actors are left to screech their way through two hours of face-palming embarrassment. I never imagined I could dislike Isabella Rossellini in anything, but here we are. D.B.