Jay Roach’s cause is noble. His new movie, The Roses, joins just a handful of contemporaries swinging to break a decades-long theatrical dry spell for adult comedies in a market cannibalized by IP. For risk-averse studios, The Roses is as safe a bet as can be cast in a dying genre: it is a remake of an adaptation — Danny Devito’s 1989 The War of the Roses, itself stemming from Warren Adler’s novel — helmed by the guy who grossed nearly a billion dollars off the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents series alone. Tag that with the Academy-endorsed pedigrees of Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch, and you’ve got a guaranteed box-office smash… between 1985 and 2007.
The Roses faces a disappointing opening weekend against its budget, but it’s an otherwise successful — and occasionally delightful — approximation of the R-rated romcoms that used to pull crowds. Under Roach’s helm, the Roses are Ivy (Coleman) and Theo (Cumberbatch), British ex-pats who quite literally fight to save their curdling marriage in their new home of San Francisco.
Until it falls apart, the Roses enjoy a happy, if traditional, life. Theo brought the family into the upper class as an architect; Ivy splits her time raising their two kids and working at a beachside crab shack (“We’ve Got Crabs!”), where she nurses deferred dreams of becoming a star chef. Those gendered scales flip when a torrential storm destroys Theo’s ambitious new building and sends a high-profile food critic into Ivy’s restaurant for shelter. A glowing review puts Ivy on the map, Theo faces the prospect of never working again, and the Roses do what they can to pass the torch without burning each other to the ground.
As the core cylinders of The Roses’ two-hander, Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch are vicious, petty, and remarkably funny. That’s no surprise for Coleman, who, before taking her mantle as an Oscar favorite, found pond-crossing success in BBC comedies like Look Around You and Peep Show. Here, she whips barbs and pot-shots as a joint-chiefing Sausalito bohemian, stealing as much schadenfreude from her husband’s spin-out as she does satisfaction from her own rising star. Cumberbatch is more of a revelation, superseding his CV of awards-bait and Marvel groaners to deliver in Theo a competent relief of Ivy. He is an efficiency-forward, min-maxing obsessive, and when his shift toward homesteading turns their children into metric-chasing junior athletes, the cracks in the Roses’ second-wave feminist marriage start to show.
The Roses’ battle-of-the-sexes conceit is as tired as it is time-worn, and the movie often struggles to lend a contemporary lens to its premise. Its successes here come via punchlines: self-appointed Good Liberals, Ivy and Theo grit their teeth to reach the bare minimum of respect on either side of their “modern” relationship, and Roach renders a thoughtful satire of a well-meaning couple who don’t mean well. (At one point, Theo’s soliloquy against capitalist bro culture ends with his children watching him jerk pantomimed dicks into his face.) Still, The Roses is rigidly heteronormative, and its 2025 mea culpas read more perfunctory than a product of good faith. There’s a discordance in translating a genre trapped in amber for new audiences, and watching the movie stumble within its own modern politics makes you wonder if the filmmakers would have rather leaned into regression.
Nonetheless, the misgivings around The Roses’ performative do-gooding are largely forgiven by its surprising nuance. Roach’s comedy doubles as an insightful and balanced look into the ways a marriage can be strained by space and time and children, and Ivy and Theo are given nearly equal weight behind their shortcomings and grievances. The movie’s script comes via Lanthimos veteran Tony McNamara; beyond the ease he finds in Coleman after their collaboration on The Favourite, McNamara’s screenplay trades the stunt-laden hijinks of its source material for a comparatively sober, if heightened, study of a failing marriage. Ivy and Theo’s dissolution is painful, and even their punchlines (“how about a three-hour circular argument that goes nowhere?”) carry the loneliness accrued ahead of their pending divorce. When The Roses finally makes good on the pratfall blowout of its original text, it feels more like an addendum to what might have been a straightforward drama after a rewrite or two.
But The Roses is decidedly a comedy, and a funny one. Coleman and Cumberbatch are flanked by Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, who fall comfortably back into their rhythms as SNL closers and round out a cast of formidable bit players (Sunita Mani, Ncuti Gatwa) lucky enough to have carved out careers in a genre once left for dead. Roach took a six-year hiatus after 2019’s Bombshell, a movie that tripped over its feet trying to make sense of its own conceit and ambitions. It’s refreshing to see him return to a comedy built for an adult audience. And for all its intentions to breathe life back into theatrical comedies, The Roses thankfully isn’t derivative of Roach’s biggest franchises, finding something fresh even amid its missteps. It’s as tender and funny as a remake of an all but forgotten ’80s movie could be, even better while sharing its laughs with a theater full of strangers.
DIRECTOR: Jay Roach; CAST: Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Andy Samberg, Allison Janney, Jamie Demetriou; DISTRIBUTOR: Searchlight Pictures; IN THEATERS: August 29; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
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