Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Dotsthavesp I wanted to but couldn't!

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

ccbo Time to think and reflect, time to ponder. Opportunity to reflect on the darkness of suffering hearts, feeling of misery and love slowly turning into madness - thats how it felt in smokey mountains, a classical greek tragedy, but with entangled stories!

smoke0 First off, don't believe any reviews that claim the book was great, because it wasn't, and if you want to know why, check various book sites, as it's been reviewed by enough readers, including myself, who found it severely lacking in character development and general engagement. Anyone who enjoyed it had to be subconsciously filling in the blanks, and this movie at least does that much, using actors we like to bring some humanity to the book's wooden and opaque archetypes. The storyline is always compacted in a film adaptation and what was lost from the book wasn't that important overall, and if you view this as a Cliff's Notes of the novel you'll be better off. If you really need to read the book, do it after you see the movie, so you can at least add some subtext to the characters.

skeptic skeptical I have not read the book, and I see that most of the naysayers have. To me, knowing nothing about the book, this was a well-made film and the acting quite good, relative to some of the movies I've seen of late... I did find the "moral" a bit hard to swallow. Something like "barren women are doomed to misery". Seriously, Serena has a miscarriage and her life begins to unravel until finally she is driven crazy by the fact that her husband fathered another woman's child. The woman had been working at the timber company delivering meals with "extras" to the cabin where the owner of the company stayed before he met Serena, who stole his heart and became his wife. I enjoyed gaining some insight into how these timber camps worked in earlier times in North Carolina. The nature was beautiful and the corruption depicted and power struggles over land seemed pretty realistic. Definitely worth sitting through for the visuals alone. I might even watch this one again because of the excellent cinematography.

MartinHafer With Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in this film, I am sure folks immediately thought of their lovely romance in "Silver Linings Playbook"--and that's natural. However, when people saw that this was NOT a romantic film but a very, very grim and slow film, I am sure that alone turned off many fans. Regardless, folks were sure turned off and this went on to be one of the biggest money-losing films of the year. Despite this, is the film any good?Well, yes and no. I'd say yes in that there are some very nice performances==particularly by Jennifer Lawrence. While she plays a thoroughly unlikable lady, she is able to convey a lot of emotions without actually saying anything. I was very impressed by her. As for Bradley Cooper....well, his character wasn't very interesting. The film also has some lovely location shots. What I didn't like, was that the film was too stark, too quiet and too god-awful depressing. Additionally, and this is a more minor quibble, but I HATE how in the close-up shots the camera NEVER remains still. I am sure some folks think it makes the film artsy, but on the big screen it probably induced nausea.The story itself is about greed, corruption and amorality--themes that made me think of "There Will Be Blood", though without the larger than life leading performance. The Pembertons (Lawrence and Cooper) marry and move to the area which is now the Great Smokey National Park during the early Depression. Their goals are to eventually earn enough for a huge spread in Brazil--and both seem willing to abandon morality and decency to do it. However, Mrs. Pemberton is a lot like Lady Macbeth--the vicious woman pushing her husband to do ANYTHING to earn this fortunate. But when Mrs. Pemberton realizes that a woman in town with a small child is Mr. Pemberton's, this same vicious and amoral energy is about to be unleashed on the husband, child and old mistress.This is a slow and unpleasant film...I'll admit this readily. However, I don't think overall that it's a bad film--even if it is a movie practically overflowing with nastiness! I see it as a film that STILL has an interesting story that could have certainly been much better. Giving the story some energy, some life would have greatly improved it. As it is, I just can't see most folks being very willing to watch this sort of unpleasantness.