Like a zombie playing opossum, the fifth and final entry in the pallid "Twilight" franchise makes one last, uproarious grasp for attention.

Signs of life come too late to convince the unconvinced that $2.5 billion in world sales is anything but a cosmic absurdity.

Ah, but Edward and Bella were never really ours, were they? Easily the best of this mopey, dopey series, "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2" goes out with an extended, over- the-top, head-ripping battle sequence that taunts non- believers with the fun we could have been having all along.

Director Bill Condon delivers the loopy vampire Armageddon after muddling through the essentials: moony reaction shots, third-rate digital effects, Carter Burwell's cloying score and Taylor Lautner's abs.

Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart, slightly less pinched than usual) is now a vampire and mother, courtesy of undead soulmate Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, headed for nowhere).

Bounding over treetops, scaling a mountain and dining on cougar, Bella takes to post-human life with gusto.

"I'm never going to get enough of this," she tells Edward after a round of vampire sex.

Interruptus arrives via the Volturi, an ancient, powerful class of vampires who take a dim view of cross-species hanky-panky and its results: They've come to kill little Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy), the fast-aging, dreadfully named and one-of-a-kind spawn of Bella and Edward.

"Only the known is safe," says Volturi leader Aro (Michael Sheen, having more fun than all the others combined). "Only the known is tolerable."

The snow-peaked showdown is "Twilight" at fever pitch, more exciting by half and sillier by far than previous sojourns. A phalanx of black-cloaked Volturi stands off against a United Nations of Cullen allies garbed in Olympic pageant finery.

By the time a bare-chested pseudo-Mayan struts afield, Condon ("Kinsey," "Gods and Monsters") has settled on the proper, logical goodbye: Wrap it in a loincloth, give it a speech and enjoy the laughs.

"The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2," from Summit Entertainment, is playing across the United States.

Hut! Hut!

The first half of "Silver Linings Playbook" doesn't seem like a comedy.

Its severely bipolar main character, Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper), has just spent eight months in a Baltimore mental hospital; now he's back in Philadelphia, wobbling on the edge of sanity, potentially violent and hanging on by the thread of hope that he'll be able to repair his ruined marriage.

His parents (Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro) have taken him in, but his manic episodes – like tearing up the house in the middle of the night in a frantic search for his wedding video – frighten and bewilder them.

Then he meets Tiffany (the petite, gargly voiced powerhouse Jennifer Lawrence), a young widow who's nearly as crazy as he is. Immediately she wants him – he's not interested – and the movie turns, gradually and imperceptibly, into something more conventional. Thank goodness.

The writer-director, David O. Russell ("Three Kings," "The Fighter"), has a knack for mixing tones, and he's terrific with actors. De Niro, for example, who can seem half there when he isn't engaged, is touching as an OCD Philadelphia Eagles fanatic who loves his son but has no idea how to deal with his mood swings.

Why is Tiffany drawn to a guy who's so clearly bad news (until he isn't)? There's no good reason, but Cooper and Lawrence have chemistry, and, as Russell directs them, they play their yearning characters with a minimum of pathos.

"Silver Linings Playbook" probably isn't true to the lower reaches of human experience. But it's true to the history of American romantic comedy, and it's an utter delight.

"Silver Linings Playbook," from the Weinstein Company, opened Wednesday in Sacramento.

Growling good

Ang Lee's "Life of Pi," which opened the New York Film Festival in September, tells the story of a shipwrecked boy and a Bengal tiger alone on the ocean together.

The boy has to gain the animal's trust to keep them both alive.

From the opening moments, Lee makes clear his intention: to amaze. And with star-sprinkled skies above a phosphorescent sea, a rushing and leaping whale, a sudden invasion of flying fish that comes on like a thunderstorm, he does.

The movie opened nationwide Wednesday.

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