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On the Rocks

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On the Rocks isn't as potent as its top-shelf ingredients might suggest, but the end result still goes down easy -- and offers high proof of Bill Murray's finely aged charm.

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Sofia Coppola

Bill Murray

Rashida Jones

Marlon Wayans

Jessica Henwick

Jenny Slate

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, on the rocks.

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First things first: this movie needed another half hour. There’s no other way to explain the peculiar absence with which it leaves you. More time would make this soufflé of a movie even richer. But, if you can look beyond the 90-minute runtime depriving this movie of a more satisfying conclusion, there is not simply “a lot to like,” there’s an embarrassment of riches crying out for perusal. “On the Rocks” is the kind of doodle only a truly skilled director could produce.

Laura ( Rashida Jones ) thinks Dean ( Marlon Wayans ) is cheating on her, despite the fact they have two kids together. The idea so preoccupies Laura that she’s become something of a shell. She can’t write her book, she’s not much of an active listener to her friend Vanessa ( Jenny Slate ), and everything reads like culpability when she sees Dean amongst his co-workers. Something about the way associate Fiona ( Jessica Henwick ) holds onto Dean’s arm just rubs her the wrong way. Add that to Dean’s workaholism and general distance from the responsibilities of being a husband and she’s in a full-blown crisis. The last thing she needs is her emotionally distant reprobate father Felix ( Bill Murray ) getting involved, but that’s exactly what he’s gonna do.

There’s a scene at about the midway point where Laura and Felix tail Dean through lower Manhattan and they get pulled over by a cop. Murray’s hellcat manages to convince the arresting officer that he knew his father long enough to not only get out of a ticket but get the cop and his partner to give them a jump in starting the antique Italian sports car he’s driving for the evening. This, we can’t help but imagine, is how it must feel to be Sofia Coppola at a film festival. You can’t even get pulled over without a cop offering to give you a lift. Your dad made “ Apocalypse Now ” and “ The Godfather ,” of course they want to help.

Coppola’s made a couple of films about her complicated relationship to the real world and the famous men who tend to set its boundaries (2003’s “ Lost in Translation ,” 2010’s “ Somewhere ”), but this is the first one that finds her small enough to admit her place in it happens to be in the shadow of the guy who helped coin cinematic grammar as we know it. It’s a remarkably vulnerable thing to do this far into a career all about debunking legends and iconoclastic gestures, and it’s one of the many empathetic pleasures to be found in this frequently heartbreaking film.

“On the Rocks” plays like a hardwired Italian comedy, from the silly surveillance job Murray and Jones pull on Wayans to the quick jag to a gorgeous resort in the third act. This is a film that pulls towards awkward and silly humanity like an old roadster nosing towards the shoulder. Murray, with his voice finally betraying his age, has an immaculate wardrobe that cuts a figure like some ur-Fellini gentleman scoundrel. We remember how his renaissance began, working with Coppola’s cousin Jason Schwartzman in “ Rushmore ” and then for the director herself in “Lost in Translation” and the more charming than it ought be “A Very Murray Christmas.” And, thanks to Coppola’s use of Michael Nyman ’s “In Re Don Giovanni,” a cut from Peter Greenaway ’s “The Falls,” which predicted all of American independent cinema, we see Coppola trying to cobble together a kind of roadmap through her very Italian American heritage and relationship to the cinema, a place of spoiled aristocrats and mad kings. It’s as if she whipped a meringue from 50 or 60 pages from a cinema history textbook.

There’s so much to love about “On the Rocks” that it’s rather easy to overlook the ending that doesn’t seem to meaningfully abate its narrative concerns. We leave the film convinced of something the movie won’t fess up to, but ultimately that may itself be the point of this deceptively frothy exercise. Coppola may not have found tragedy in her study of a marriage and a family in need of defibrillation, but she made Manhattan look like Rome, she made her life look like an Alberto Sordi comedy, and she made her life into the genuinely mythic thing it is by reckoning with it. I don’t usually come to Coppola for tidiness, for adorable antics, for a quick look inside the guts of the American cinema and its place on the world stage, but “On the Rocks” is all that and more. In fact, throw in her Yasujiro Ozu-esque flaunting of the 180-degree rule and it’s almost everything.

When someone finds a cure for the Coronavirus I’m going to move out of New York. When I go, I’ll be leaving behind more than my Queens apartment and most of the critics you read. I’ll be leaving behind a place of myth and legend, a kingdom of charm and stone. “On the Rocks” shows New York as it is, a place where dreams don’t come true. Some days, there’s no place in the world you’d rather be. A place where your ordinary life looks like a Greek tragedy and an Italian comedy, a place where we write our own stories when fate fails to provide. I’ll miss you, New York. I’ll miss you.

This review was filed in conjunction with the world premiere at the New York Film Festival. The film will open limited theatrically on October 2nd and be on Apple TV Plus on October 23rd.

Scout Tafoya

Scout Tafoya is a critic and filmmaker who writes for and edits the arts blog Apocalypse Now and directs both feature length and short films.

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Film credits.

On the Rocks (2020)

Rated R for some language/sexual references.

Rashida Jones as Laura

Bill Murray as Felix

Marlon Wayans as Dean

Jenny Slate as Vanessa

Jessica Henwick as Fiona

Sofia Coppola

Cinematographer

Philippe Le Sourd
Sarah Flack

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‘On the Rocks’ Review: Daddy Dearest and His Late Bloomer

In Sofia Coppola’s latest, Rashida Jones plays a woman worried about her marriage. Who’s she gonna call? Bill Murray, a.k.a. Dad.

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By Manohla Dargis

It isn’t surprising how effortlessly Bill Murray takes possession of Sofia Coppola’s gently comic “On the Rocks” — though this hijacking may be more of a sly directorial surrender. Casting Murray is a surefire way to win over an audience. It also means yielding at least part of the movie to him, which is what happens here. He plays a bigger-than-life sybarite whose daughter enlists him to help with her marital woes. If that sounds like a dubious idea for a grown child, it’s also a playful conceptual gambit for a director whose father, Francis Ford Coppola, casts his own long shadow.

Murray plays Felix, a retired gallerist and full-time bon vivant who’s done ostentatiously well for himself, with a vintage Alfa Romeo in the garage and an Ellsworth Kelly on the mantel. His daughter Laura (Rashida Jones, yet another child of a legendary father ) is a writer who’s struggling to put words on paper while caring for her two young girls. Her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), always seems to be perfunctorily kissing Laura hello or goodbye on his way out the door (to run his generic start-up), leaving her in the soft domestic chaos that envelops her. She may be the heroine of this story, but she isn’t the center of her universe.

The plot hinges on Laura’s not-unreasonable fear that Dean is no longer interested in her and may be having an affair. All the familiar signs seem to be there, including his business trips and long work hours that often find Laura home with the children. Coppola sketches in Laura’s world and its loneliness (ripe terrain for dark thoughts) early and starkly when Dean abruptly pulls away from her embrace one night. The next morning, as Laura tends to the kids, and Dean hurries to leave for work, they move around their kitchen with well-rehearsed choreography. The domestic cacophony may be reassuring, but the coarsening of intimacy is palpable.

Coppola’s minimalism can be frustratingly rather than productively diffuse, but her aesthetic reserve suits this story and the diffidence of her heroine. Laura is appealing — or rather Jones is — and you’re drawn to her just by virtue of her being the lead. Even so it’s instructive that the first voice you hear in the movie is Felix’s. “And remember, don’t give your heart to any boys,” he says in voice-over, right after the American Zoetrope credit appears and before the first image materializes. “You’re mine until you get married,” Felix continues, “then you’re still mine.” A girlish voice laughs and adds an incredulous “OK, Dad.” And then Chet Baker starts singing.

The first image in the movie is of a sumptuous spray of wedding flowers on a table that the camera glides over. It keeps going, passing over a wine glass and a pair of clasped hands before landing on a close-up of the newly married Laura and Dean. Seated at opposite ends of the frame, they are bewitching. Yet if they were any farther apart, they wouldn’t be in the same shot. Within seconds, they have filled the space between them with shy looks and frisky smiles, and then they’re off, running down one of those vertiginous, slightly ominous spiral staircases that filmmakers like to brandish as a warning. You’re left to wonder if they have ever truly closed that divide.

By the time the movie kicks in, the fairy tale is over, and Laura is tapping Felix for advice, though asking a serially unfaithful father for marital counsel constitutes a kind of magical thinking. Coppola never explains why Laura asks him to help, though his love is its own justification as well as a refuge. And Murray’s characteristically easygoing delivery and shambolic presence radiate enough goodwill that you go along with it. Murray wears his roles lightly, so you always feel that you’re getting some version of the actor himself, the comic legend (funny, dry, unknowable), which usefully softens Felix’s edges. Laura may remember his sins, but they no longer cut.

Jones has a narrow range, but her face, with its sharp angles and pensive eyes, was made to get lost in, and she’s appealingly down to earth, the actor as best friend. When she looks pained, you want to help, too. Again and again, Coppola visually isolates Laura, often in dark rooms, inviting us to look at her, yes, but also to wonder: What does she see? What does she think? For much of the movie, she seems like a spectator in her own life. She rides along, she goes along. In the past, Coppola’s embrace of ambiguity could feel like a dodge, a way of evading meaning. But in “On the Rocks,” a wistful and lovely story about finally coming of age, there’s nothing ambiguous about how she makes us see a woman too long lost in life’s shadow.

On the Rocks Rated R for language, which is a ridiculous, Puritanical call. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In select theaters, and on Apple TV Plus starting Oct. 23. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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“On the Rocks,” Reviewed: Sofia Coppola’s Self-Questioning Film About a Father’s Destructive Dazzle

By Richard Brody

Rashida Jones and Bill Murray driving in a red car in Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks

There’s no inherent conflict between style and substance—for the best filmmakers, they’re inseparable—but one of the most stylistically advanced of current filmmakers, Sofia Coppola, fascinatingly, movingly, and ironically dramatizes her experience of such a conflict in her new film, “On the Rocks” (coming to Apple TV+ this Friday), which she wrote and directed. Here, she once again joins forces with Bill Murray (who, of course, starred, with Scarlett Johansson, in “Lost in Translation,” and was the center of attention in her divertissement “ A Very Murray Christmas ”)—and she does so with a surprising, bracing sense of skepticism. In the new film, even as Coppola distills and delivers the wry and rarefied delights of Murray’s style of performance and personal bearing, she wrestles with the very sources of her own sensibility and the roots of her own taste.

It’s a story set in the milieu that has long obsessed Coppola—within the four dimensions of money, power, generational relations, and romantic crisis. The protagonist, Laura Keane (Rashida Jones), is a seemingly well-regarded author with an international career, who lives in a luxury apartment in a converted SoHo loft. She has an advance on her next book, but she is struggling to write it, because of the busyness of her family life. The breadwinner is her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), the chief executive of a successful tech startup, which requires him to travel far and wide and to devote vast amounts of time to his work, leaving Laura to manage the household and care for the couple’s two young daughters, Maya (Liyanna Muscat) and Theo (played by the twins Alexandra Mary Reimer and Anna Chanel Reimer). Laura has begun to suspect Dean of having an affair with a new colleague, Fiona (Jessica Henwick), and, when speaking by phone with her father, Felix (Murray), she discloses her suspicions. Felix—after admonishing her, from Paris, to “start thinking like a man”—takes action, showing up spontaneously in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes and plotting a wide-ranging surveillance and deep-delving investigation of Dean.

As if with a cinematic tuning fork that hums its overtones throughout the film, Coppola begins the movie with a black screen and a voice-over conversation: Felix’s declaration to the child Laura, “And remember, don’t give your heart to any boys. You’re mine until you get married. Then you’re still mine,” and the young Laura’s audibly eye-rolling response, “Um, O.K., Dad.” Felix is more than a possessive father; he’s a suave whirlwind of engulfing power, a wealthy and worldly art dealer who takes commanding control of her life. Dashingly elegant, he makes his appearance like the star of Laura’s life—he rolls down the tinted window in the back seat of his limo and fixes her in his luminescent gaze. Felix dresses up: a pale seersucker suit, a sumptuously soft dark suit, a jaunty racing cap. He knows the private clubs and concierges and maître d’s in New York and cities worldwide. He knows the hotels everywhere and knows what people do there. He knows what to order in every restaurant, and he has friends to visit and villas to borrow in far-flung destinations. When he greets Laura with a huge tin of caviar for them to share, he adds an anecdote about cosmonauts who ate it. (I won’t spoil the ending.) He’s a walking volume of the Great American Songbook, and he unhesitatingly adorns social occasions (as Murray adorns the movie) with his expressive, emotive yet wry singing voice. He also whistles, provides whistling lessons for Laura, and reminds her that she was named for the title song from Otto Preminger’s film of the same name. Yet he doesn’t call her by name—he addresses her with a handful of diminutives, ranging from “Shorty” to “Kiddo” to “Kid,” and brings her to “Bogart’s table” at the 21 Club to seal the connection.

When they’re together, Felix dominates the conversation with what Laura calls “lots of theories and stories,” many of which have to do with sex and gender—his own glamorous romantic adventures and his speculations on the subject. Laura’s bangle bracelet sparks his historical reflection that women were formerly considered men’s property; his reflections on evolutionary theory yield his explanation of why adult men are attracted to adolescent women and why men are relentlessly domineering philanderers. He claims he’s going deaf—but only to women’s voices (and ascribes it to their pitch). He has also dominated Laura’s life as much by his absence as by his presence: when Laura was growing up, Felix left Laura’s mother (Alva Chinn) and the family for another woman. Felix is a serial philanderer, a relentless seducer who, even now, at around seventy, in Laura’s presence, flirts outrageously with young women, perfect strangers—a waitress, his granddaughters’ ballet teacher, one of Dean’s colleagues.

Felix is also impulsive and intrepid, and the detective-like adventures that he ropes her into, in order to track and survey Dean, run major risks—including legal ones, which he eludes with the aplomb and presumptive impunity of privilege. The signal moment in the film involves the police—and it’s too juicy a scene to spoil, but suffice it to say that a situation that other people might find fearsome (and Laura, who is Black, observes the events in question dubiously), Felix is able to handle in his own inimitable way. He is equally cavalier with the lives of others: his adventures become their adventures, whether they like it or not; and, whatever they may lose along the way, they’re at least left with the stories to tell.

Because Coppola has written (and dressed) Felix with such alluring flair and breathtaking savvy (and because he’s played by the charming Murray), he comes off as a lovable rogue whose charm dominates the film as it dominates (and runs roughshod over) Laura’s life—and conceals with lofty irony the film’s mighty and terrifying core, namely, that Felix is the elegant and roguish villain of Laura’s life. Felix may have offered her, in childhood and adulthood, a significant part of her education in style—though her grandmother (Barbara Bain) and mother are also exemplars of worldly refinement, grace, and wisdom, even if they are less flamboyant about it. They also, unlike Felix, were around and taking care of things at home while Felix was traipsing around the world collecting the souvenirs of experience—exactly as, now, Laura is holding down the home front during Dean’s business travels. She also bears the petty humiliations and frustrations of a woman who, though working and despite professional accomplishment, doesn’t go to an office; ends up doing the drop-offs and the pickups and the signups and the registrations; keeps the household running; and so does her writing only in stolen moments.

Without at all ascribing Felix’s self-justifying, troglodytic philosophy, his condescending manners, his aggressively sexist behavior, or his feckless and domineering ways to any individual in her family, her past, or her circle, Coppola nonetheless delves dramatically into the personal history of her generation. She suggests the experience of women in Hollywood (and, for that matter, outside it) who came up under the authority of an older generation of men, and of the very assumptions of modern culture, including the masculinized sense of cool that Hollywood shaped and amplified. As if doing a painful intellectual and emotional archeology of her life and sensibility, she looks sharply and critically at the conveniences of wealth and the prerogatives of privilege; she confronts the attitudes and assumptions of which old-school charm and commanding manner reek. The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent tale of private and public abuses of power looks askance at Hollywood mythologies, too, including the ones of the early classic movies that Felix reveres and those that brought Murray to stardom—to which “On the Rocks” ironically owes much of its appeal.

Coppola’s previous film, “The Beguiled,” was her least stylistically refined, because her connection to the subject was tenuous and hesitant—it’s a theoretical film in which the very desire to revisit the scene of the crime (not history’s crime, but Hollywood’s) got in the way of her relationship to the events onscreen, and their real-life basis. In “On the Rocks,” Coppola’s relationship with the subject is so intense that it nearly burns away style; there’s so little distance between herself and her subject that her exquisite flourishes of refined documentary-rooted observation—short glimpses of city streets, a shot of father and daughter side by side in a restaurant, a view of Laura wearing a bright yellow dress in front of a magenta wall—seem extracted with pain from the drama’s scrutiny of a certain aesthetic sensibility, and the wealth and the power on which it depends. “On the Rocks” lends a poignantly ironic twist to a self-questioning, even self-excoriating tale of regret: its breezy tone and casual moods suggest a lightness that’s no frivolity but an urgent necessity—because the movie shatters Coppola’s own artistic bedrock as it goes along.

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‘On the Rocks’ Review: Bill Murray, His Scampishness Undimmed, Reunites with ‘Lost in Translation’ Director Sofia Coppola

He's in fine form as the bon vivant father of Rashida Jones, playing a New York author who suspects her husband of infidelity.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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If you go back and watch Sofia Coppola ’s “Lost in Translation” (2003), you’ll see that it’s lost none of its shimmer — that airily crafted blend of mood and moment, location and dislocation, all wrapped around the delicate tale of two souls who didn’t know they were lost until they found each other in the floating limbo of the Park Hyatt Tokyo. “ On the Rocks ,” Coppola’s seventh film as a writer-director, marks her creative reunion with Bill Murray , the costar of “Lost in Translation” (which Murray regards as his favorite of his own performances). And so it’s only natural that we go into it hoping for some older-and-wiser version of the same magic. When we first see Murray, he’s in the back of a chauffeured Mercedes, and he looks sensational. The eyes, with their hound-dog melancholy, still twinkle with mischief. There’s a touch more gravel in the voice, and the hair is now white, but it’s perfectly coiffed — and so is the Murray attitude of cynical zen joi de vivre.

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In “On the Rocks,” he’s in New York paying a visit to his daughter, Laura ( Rashida Jones ), who is going through some male-induced drama of her own: She has come to suspect her husband of having an affair. Laura, to judge from all available signposts, has been living the dream. She’s got a big cozy sanctuary of an apartment in the heart of Soho, and Dean ( Marlon Wayans ), the possibly straying husband (they have two beautiful and wonderfully well-adjusted daughters), is a warm, solicitous dude who has started his own company; we’re not 100 percent sure what it does (it involves client management), but it’s heating up, and the audience understands, as does Laura, how demanding his schedule is. Laura herself is an author, combing through tangles of anxiety over the fact that she can’t seem to get started on the book she’s supposed to be writing. You can tell there’s a deeper disquiet at work every time you look at her tense, downcast, putting-on-a-show-for-people face.

What’s the evidence of Dean’s affair? When he returned home from a business trip, groggy from the Xanax he popped on the plane, he kissed Laura in bed — and when she spoke he acted surprised, as if she were another person. In his suitcase, Laura finds a women’s toiletries case. When she asks Dean about it, he casually says that it belongs to Fiona (Jessica Henwick), the leggy assistant who accompanies him everywhere, and that she couldn’t fit it into her carry-on. That’s not a reassuring explanation, and when Laura checks Dean’s phone, the text messages to Fiona have all been erased. So Laura decides to ask her dad, who’s an old hand in the ways of womanizing duplicity, for advice. He hears her story about Dean’s groggy kiss and says: He thought you were someone else . Then he says: Let’s play detective to find out.

That’s just what they do, and suddenly “On the Rocks” sounds like some father-daughter buddy Hollywood rom-com: desperate woman teams up with wiseacre dad to spy on possibly philandering husband. (Twenty years ago, that could have starred Sandra Bullock, Alan Arkin, and Dermot Mulroney.) Felix shadows Dean’s hotel trail, has him followed to Cartier, and then shows up at Laura’s place driving an ancient red BMW sports convertible, so that they can spend an evening scarfing caviar and spying on Dean as he attends a suspicious client dinner. It sounds dryly amusing, and is, yet Coppola stages all this with her own fluid, open-eyed gaze of inquiry.

“On the Rocks” turns into a boozy humanistic hang-out caper movie, one that’s light-spirited and compelling, mordantly alive to the ins and outs of marriage, and a winning showcase for Murray’s aging-like-fine-whiskey brand of world-weary deviltry. But unlike “Lost in Translation” or Coppola’s other best film, “Somewhere” (which was like “Entourage” directed by Agnès Varda), there’s no extra level of mystery to this one. It holds you, but it’s a little thin.

I’ve been a Rashida Jones fan ever since “I Love You, Man” (2009), and this is the full-scale movie role she deserves. She makes Laura eager, wary, hilariously patient (as when she’s enduring the psychobabble monologues of her school-parent chum, played by Jenny Slate), and quietly teetering on the edge of her world falling apart. Through it all, her journey to redemption is driven by the question: Is Laura’s father, in his flawed rapscallion way, all-seeing? Or does he see what he wants to see? “Lost in Translation” was about a soul-to-soul connection that sidestepped romance. “On the Rocks” is a romance, in which a father and daughter learn who they are through the lens of what love and trust are really about. The movie cruises forward on all of Coppola’s gifts, yet it’s just good enough to make you wish it were major.

Reviewed at Digital Arts, Sept. 21, 2020. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 96 MIN.

Production: An Apple TV Films, A24 release of an American Zoetrope production. Producers: Sofia Coppola, Youree Henley. Executive producers: Roman Coppola, Mitch Glazer, Fred Roos.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Sofia Coppola. Camera: Philippe Le Sourd. Editor: Sarah Flack. Music: Phoenix.
With: Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans, Jessica Henwick, Jenny Slate, Barbara Bain, Nadia Dajani, Musto Pelinkovicci, Jules Wilcox, Alexandra Mary Reimer, Anna Chanel Reimer.

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Bill Murray shines in Sofia Coppola's breezy, featherweight caper On the Rocks : Review

In a directing career spanning more than 20 years, Sofia Coppola has made a sort of specialty of loneliness, her disparate characters — from suicidal virgins and let-them-eat-cake queens to middle-aged movie stars adrift in Tokyo — all searching for some deeper connection. (Even the larcenous Los Angeles teens of 2013’s The Bling Ring might have traded their purloined Birkin bags for a little genuine parental attention; or not ).

On the Rock s’ premise seems at first to fall easily in line: A frazzled New York mother named Laura ( Rashida Jones ), her days an endless roundelay of sippy cups and school drop-offs, is more convinced every day that her husband, Dean ( Marlon Wayans ), might be stepping out on her. Between work and sleep and caring for their two young kids, they operate more like a pit crew than a couple, with Laura — a blocked writer taunted by a book contract she can barely stand to look at — bearing the brunt of everyday parenting. How can her domestic realities compete with the late nights and leggy Gen-Z nymphets at Dean’s advertising firm?

There's another man in her life more than happy to offer his opinions on all that: her father Felix ( Bill Murray ) a confirmed bachelor and bon vivant whose career as an international art dealer still seems to allow generous time for field trips and shenanigans. Marital intrigue is clearly catnip to Felix, even if commitment otherwise eludes him as a concept. So it doesn’t take long until he’s pulling up in his candy-apple Alfa Romeo with a caviar picnic, ready to turn a night of spousal recon into a rolling cocktail party for two.

The story itself, with its gorgeous interiors and jazzy Chet Baker soundtrack, turns out to be a bit of a wisp, a dandelion puff tossed to the gods of romance and prime Manhattan real estate. But if the emotional stakes never really seem all that crucial (love wins, in the end), Murray brings his own cosmic weight. At 70, the down-turned spaniel eyes and twanging Midwestern lilt remain undimmed; so does his magnetic effect on doormen and waitresses and passing ballerinas.

It's a long-awaited reunion of sorts too, and there are unmissable echoes in his performance of Lost in Translation , the 2003 drama whose delicate melancholy revealed a Murray most moviegoers had never seen: lonesome, vulnerable, tender at the root. His Felix is a breezier, more slippery character, but he susses out the layers; shades of mortality and regret pulling at the corners of that puckish, here’s-looking-at-you-kiddo grin.

That he steals the film so thoroughly is not so much a knock on Jones, who has a lovely naturalistic presence. But in skimming so lightly across a narrative that at least on its surface lands closer to her own than any movie she’s made before — mid-life New York artist and mother, standing in the shadow of a towering parent — Coppola seems almost glad to hand it to him, trading the harder knocks Rocks might have delivered for a brighter, slighter fizz. B

On the Rocks Is a Light Comedy About Some Heavy Feelings

This review originally ran on September 30, 2020, but we are republishing it as the movie heads to streaming on Apple TV+.

On the Rocks , the new movie from Sofia Coppola, has the premise of a mild-mannered sitcom and a heart so incongruously wounded that you might leave it wanting to gently talk up the benefits of therapy. It begins and ends positioned as a mere wisp of a thing about a woman named Laura (Rashida Jones) who lives in a loft in Soho with two daughters and a husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans). Laura’s starting to suspect that Dean, who’s been traveling a lot for the company he recently founded, has been cheating on her, and so she calls on her gadabout father, Felix (Bill Murray), for commiseration and advice. After all, Felix had an affair and left her mother back when Laura was growing up, so he should know. Felix is all too delighted to have a chance at playing infidelity consultant — “Can you just act a little less excited about this? Because this is my life, and it might be falling apart,” his daughter complains — and soon the two are bouncing around Manhattan and then hauling off to a Mexican resort in hopes of figuring out if Dean is sleeping with his co-worker Fiona (Jessica Henwick).

It’s a lark, and not a terribly engaging one, but then there are all these massive unprocessed emotions poking out from below the surface of the story like icebergs that have to be frantically navigated around. Laura’s on the cusp of turning 40, and midlife malaise is guiding what happens at least as much as worry about her relationship with her husband is (“I don’t know what women get plastic surgery,” Felix muses helpfully after informing his daughter that “a woman’s at her most beautiful between the ages of 35 and 39”). Fiona may be young and beautiful, but she’s also unencumbered, free to give her full focus to one thing while Laura is split between shepherding the kids around, failing to write the book she sold, and trying to make the most of the rare moments she has alone with Dean. As she trudges down the sidewalk in her chic nautical stripes and her Strand tote bag, pushing a high-end stroller, you can sense the degree to which she feels flattened into a role of semi-invisibility. Coppola, an auteur who’s been devoted over her career to exploring different facets of girlishness, has crafted a lightly depressive elegy to the quality — a story about someone who realizes she’s crossing beyond its insulating, stifling borders and wondering what, exactly, is on the other side. What else is there to do but seek sanctuary with Dad?

If Murray, in Lost in Translation , was playing a temporary suitor as father figure to Scarlett Johansson, here he’s playing a father as substitute suitor, squiring his little girl around town when her husband’s too busy, and gifting her with a thoughtful present for her birthday after that husband gives her an unsentimentally practical one. But it’s not Laura’s marriage or, for that matter, her career that are the true drivers of the movie. Her relationship remains in the background, more a concept than a nuanced reality, and the details of her book and ambitions regarding it are never discussed. The more time Laura spends with Felix, a chaotically outsize figure who whisks her away to impromptu boozy lunches and insists on taking her out to the ‘21’ club for her birthday, the more it becomes clear that he’s the one she’s really fretting about. Or, rather, him and everything he’s come to represent to her about who gets to leave and to start over, and who stays behind, picking up the toys on the floor and feeling like romance and gallantry are forever behind her.

Felix, played by Murray with a careless charm that’s as familiar as it is still effective, is someone who appears to glide through life without exerting any visible effort. He’s a successful art dealer who habitually flirts with every woman he sees, and who knows the name of every server and maître d’ and, as he demonstrates in the most memorable scene in the movie, every cop in the city, too. Doors open for him, and people turn his way like plants toward the sun, and as much as she tries to pretend otherwise, Laura (played by Jones like a living expressionless face emoji) craves his attention, too. He just seems to live in a more vivid, colorful New York than she does, an older and cooler version of the city in which you can sit at the table at which Humphrey Bogart proposed to Lauren Bacall and eat caviar while sitting outside the Soho House in a convertible spying on your son-in-law.

On the Rocks feels, for a Coppola movie, unusually drab, though at least some of that’s by design. The life that Laura and Dean share is laid out in precise, exacting details that are destined to enrage anyone who’s ever taken issue with the director’s tendency to tell stories about the rich before. Their home is a $4 million apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows in the back and a “Bernie 2016” sticker on the door. It’s an existence rooted in wealth but presented as mundanely middle class — which reflects how it feels to Laura, who sees herself as reduced to being another mom in the school drop-off line, drained of vitality compared to her father, whose existence is touched by magic. On the Rocks isn’t a great movie, but it’s one overflowing with feelings that it tries to squash into something tidier. Among them are fear of forever being scarred by a father who up and left, anger at how easily he still indulges his impulses while she’s trapped behaving sensibly, and a broader resentment at how aging can differ for men and women. If it’s difficult to reconcile those raw-edged emotions with the pat conclusion On the Rocks arrives at, it’s because the film never really manages to do that either.

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Review: Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola reunite in ‘On the Rocks,’ with mixed results

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The Los Angeles Times is committed to reviewing new theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries inherent risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials. We will continue to note the various ways readers can see each new film, including drive-in theaters in the Southland and VOD/streaming options when available.

The title of “On the Rocks,” Sofia Coppola’s sweet, undernourished but well-liquored new comedy, can be read two ways. At first it would seem to describe a happy Manhattan marriage that comes under threat when Laura (Rashida Jones), a writer, becomes concerned that her jet-setting entrepreneur husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), is having an affair. His new company is taking off, and he’s been spending a lot of hours at the office and on the road, many of them in the company of an attractive new colleague (Jessica Henwick).

Laura’s suspicions are encouraged by her worldly art-dealer father, Felix (Bill Murray), who knows a thing or two about cads from personal experience and who supplies the title’s other meaning by consuming a steady stream of alcoholic beverages. Much of “On the Rocks,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival and will open in theaters Oct. 2, unfolds in bars and restaurants of vintage wood-paneled elegance, where Felix is invariably friendly with the staff (or just good at pretending). He drags his daughter to these classic spots, like the 21 Club and Raoul’s, stuffing her with martinis and ice cream, wild anecdotes and practical wisdom, hoping to chase away her loneliness and perhaps assuage his own.

Watching them together, you might be flooded with a loneliness of your own, even if you were to tune out their conversation entirely (which you may sometimes be tempted to do). Coppola shot this picture in New York last summer, and the sights and sounds of COVID-free nightlife — the background music, the barroom chatter, the clink of plates and silverware, the enveloping shadows of Philippe Le Sourd’s cinematography — are likely to induce an exquisite sense of nostalgia. So will the daytime scenes of Laura dropping off her kids, Maya (Liyanna Muscat) and Theo (Alexandra and Anna Reimer), at school and then returning by choice, not necessity, to her home office, where she’s dealing with a serious case of writer’s block.

In addition to being an intimate, generally lighthearted comedy of family ties and wayward eyes, then, “On the Rocks” is an accidental time capsule of pre-pandemic life, set in a New York that might have looked idyllic even if the movie had been released last year. Seen in the harsh glare of the present, the characters’ problems — generational differences, marital anxieties, creative inertia — might seem both derivative and almost desirably quaint, though in a way that produces more sympathy than scorn. We’ve been here before, after all. And this is hardly the first Sofia Coppola movie to situate itself at a cautious remove from reality, to treat comedy, romance, fantasy and even history as a kind of bulwark against the tensions and traumas of the outside world.

To these eyes, the sense of willed isolation in Coppola’s movies has always felt knowing and purposeful; to others, it’s a sign of her irredeemable obliviousness. Some of her best films, notably “Marie Antoinette” and “Somewhere,” have been dismissed as frivolous baubles, steeped in the unexamined privilege and commodity fetishism of a lifelong Hollywood royal. Few would deny that Coppola knows her way around the celebrity bubble, though given some of the reflexive jabs hurled her way, who could blame her for staying there? Even when she doesn’t — even when she steps back into the distant past, as she did in her spare, haunting Civil War western, “The Beguiled ” — she tends to get knocked for grasping (or not grasping) at subjects presumably beyond her reach.

It would be presumptuous to suggest that she’s back in her comfort zone with “On the Rocks,” in part because her filmmaking, whether it arises from comfort or discomfort, rarely betrays any strain. The personal dimensions of the story are obvious but unforced: While Coppola has acknowledged that the character of Felix was partly inspired by her own famous father, the director Francis Ford Coppola, the more salient reference point may be her earlier collaboration with Murray in “Lost in Translation.”

In that Oscar-winning art-house favorite, Murray played Bob Harris, a jet-lagged Tokyo drifter whose most expressive quality was his quiet, sardonic reserve. Like Bob, Felix drinks a lot; unlike Bob, he’s an incessant talker, an inveterate flirt, a doting grandpa and a guy with the advantage of being on his home turf. To Laura he is not just a father but a confidant and something of a double agent, someone whose own romantic indiscretions — he and her mother split up years earlier — might finally come in handy. When Laura calls him with concerns that Dean may be cheating, Felix immediately assumes the worst, in part because he has been the worst himself.

“You need to start thinking like a man,” he says, and then proceeds to give her a feature-length demonstration. As he sips Bacardi, chats up the wait staff and runs into old friends and flames left and right, Felix treats Laura to a running lecture on the impossibility of monogamy and the primal, atavistic nature of human sexuality. She greets all this father-knows-best blather with exasperated eye-rolls but also a daughter’s natural indulgence. As much as she wants to believe in her husband (nicely played by Wayans in a deft, close-to-the-vest performance), she can’t help but go along with her dad’s cynicism as well as his increasingly elaborate plans to trap Dean mid-deception.

Some caper-esque shenanigans ensue, involving a private investigator, a sporty red convertible and a sudden, impulsive trip down south. The bursts of madcap energy feel like something new in Coppola’s work; she has acknowledged the “Thin Man” mysteries as an inspiration, and the ’80s New York screwball of “Arthur” seems like another. But the comic engine that powers this movie is ultimately its star’s merry-prankster persona. You see in Felix the deadpan anarchic streak that has made Murray a force in American comedy for decades. At the same time, the actor seems to be winking at his own reputation for off-screen mischief — the tricks, stunts and pop-up bartending gigs that have made him a kind of one-man flash mob.

“It must be very nice to be you,” Laura mutters at one point, and “On the Rocks,” punch-drunk in love with its star, doesn’t really contradict her. It’s a shame we don’t get more time with some of her other, less narcissistic family members (played too briefly by Barbara Bain, Juliana Canfield and Alva Chinn), though Dad’s antics are fun to watch — at least until they aren’t. As Felix drags his daughter all over New York and beyond, you may start to wonder if there’s anything more to him than his fabulous connections, his galling privilege and the obvious relish he takes in being played by Bill Murray. You may also find yourself wishing that Jones, though affectingly down-to-earth as ever, had been given a fully developed character to play, rather than a set of straight-man reactions: scold, shrug, sip, repeat.

‘On the Rocks’

Rating: R, for some language/sexual references Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 2, Vineland Drive-in, City of Industry; Mission Tiki Drive-in, Montclair; and in limited release where theaters are open; available Oct. 23 on Apple TV+

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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On The Rocks Review

On The Rocks

It’s almost two years since the announcement that Apple and indie film heroes A24 would partner on original films. The first film they’d produce: Sofia Coppola ’s eighth feature, drama comedy On The Rocks , which reunites the director with sometime muse Bill Murray.

Writer Laura ( Rashida Jones ) is struggling with two small kids, writer’s block and the creeping suspicion that her apparently perfect husband ( Marlon Wayans ) is cheating on her with a colleague. After she confides in her father ( Bill Murray ) — a feckless, sexist (if oddly charming) dinosaur best suited to life and gender politics of the 1970s — she finds herself creeping around the streets and cocktail bars of New York trying to catch him out.

What is seemingly a portrait of a marriage in crisis, the “on the rocks” of the title, is actually an interesting study of an interior crisis modern women face; one that is far more seismic than whether their husband is jumping in the sack with his hot, long-legged business associate. A crisis of who we become once we’ve traded the title of daughter for one of wife or mother or both. Of what becomes of our creative impulses and drive. Of our sense of identity.

There’s a quiet, often intoxicating charm to the rhythms of this film.

Rubbing up against this very contemporary concern is Murray’s Felix. A man from another age, who exists in a New York seemingly of a different era. Clubs and and restaurants with plush leather seating, maître d’s who know your name and preferred liquor.

Though Coppola’s dialogue can be spritely, the clashes that take place between father and daughter, across the generational divide, aren’t always subtle, or even particularly interesting. He’s of the generation who believe women are owned by men — especially by the men who love them (the film opens with a piece of narration from when Laura’s clearly a child. “And remember,” says her father. “Don’t give your heart to any boy. You’re mine until you get married. And then you’re still mine”). And the seeds of marital strife don’t always avoid cliché (Dean buys Laura a kitchen appliance for her birthday. Danger!).

But there’s a quiet, often intoxicating charm to the rhythms of this film. From the comfortable routines of family life — Laura in a Beastie Boys T-shirt overseeing teeth-cleaning and hair-brushing; the hurried, happy walk to school — to the ebb and flow of unease about his fidelity. And how this questioning of the man who Laura’s long been convinced is nothing like her philandering father only seeks to widens the cracks that have long existed between her and Felix. On The Rocks is also a portrait of New York at its finest — the streets humming with musicality and shimmering in the frame, as Murray releases the throttle on his classic car. In truth, it’s arguably a New York that doesn’t exist anymore, and as such there’s something almost melancholic about the city that Coppola renders with such tenderness and affection.

Murray is infuriatingly, but resolutely endearing, his relationship with Jones credible and full of regret and heart. And Jones is compelling as a woman trying to remember if who she was is still who she is.

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‘On the Rocks’: Bill and Sofia’s Excellent New York Adventure

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Sofia Coppola ’s On the Rocks (in theaters now; it starts streaming on Apple TV + on October 23rd), is in many ways a straightforwardly neurotic New York comedy — albeit one run through the stylishly lensed, muted discontent familiar to this director’s work. It’s a little zany, a little blue, emotionally jagged, adventurously all over the place. If you’re a romantic, though, the movie’s inciting incident — the bomb that detonates all the problems to come — probably plays like something closer to a scene out of a horror movie.

Laura (Rashida Jones) and Dean (Marlon Wayans) are a handsome young couple well-off enough to afford a family-size SoHo apartment. She’s a writer; he’s a rising star in tech who knows, to the day, how many followers his company’s account has gained on Instagram. They have a kid who’s still stroller-age. He, being the head of a startup that’s off to a dizzying start, is often out and about traveling on business. She, being a writer, is the one stuck back in New York playing stay-at-home mom, walking the kids to school, enduring the self-obsession of her fellow Manhattanite parents, making sure the kids don’t float off into space. All of this despite the mounting pressures of an upcoming deadline for her book.

One night, Xanaxed and groggy from a flight back to New York City from London, Dean arrives home, collapses on the bed next to his wife, and starts to nuzzle and kiss her. She stirs awake, happy to see him, and says, “Hi.” Dean stops and gives her a confused look, then hits her with a deflated flash of recognition. “Oh,” he says. “Hi.” And passes out. The second strike comes the next morning, when Laura finds a bag of toiletries in Dean’s suitcase that is distinctly girlish and very obviously not Dean’s. It is also, equally obviously, not Laura’s — nor is the body oil she finds when she opens it.

That’s bad. But in truth, the damage had already been done the night before. Laura’s mind had already been flooded with questions, and those questions are what drive her through the rest of the movie. Who did Dean think he was kissing last night? Because it sure wasn’t her. And what’s with that reaction — “Oh”? The undistilled, chopped-liver disappointment of it. She’s his wife!

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On the Rocks kicks off, in other words, by cracking open a sinkhole of desperate questions, dangerous suspicions, and comically bad choices beneath what otherwise appears to be a stable, loving marriage. Not that things were perfect. Plain, uncomplicated happiness for women — particularly married, well-off women — is not exactly a trademark of Coppola’s work. And Laura arrives with all the hallmarks of a Coppola heroine. She’s a woman with everything she needs, materially speaking, who is nevertheless visibly unsatisfied. What is often mistaken for mere bourgeois ennui in Coppola’s films is, here as elsewhere, a more specific ailment: privilege that isn’t quite paying off, a good life that doesn’t really feel so good.

That’s in large part because of Laura’s other baggage. Baggage that arrives charming but gimlet-eyed, smooth with splash of venom. Baggage manifest in the form of a man named Felix: Laura’s father, played with incredible wit and cucumber-cool misogyny by Bill Murray . He is as attractive as he is repulsive. And he is, as this movie shows, a powerful force in Laura’s life. Sure, she has other problems. She is uncertain of where she fits into the life of her husband, cheating or no; her book isn’t going well; conversations with other women — more visibly “cool” women — leave Laura feeling alien. Still, somehow, these roads — Laura’s general lack of sense of where she fits into her own life — seem to point back to Felix.

On the Rocks is a movie about a mistake: Not Dean’s, but rather Laura’s. Because she asks her father for advice on what to do about Dean. Hilarity, of the cringing, ridiculous variety, necessarily ensues. Felix, who’s 76 and very much stuck in his was, is the kind of man who — old-school player that he is — calls his “kid” with equal parts affection and sincere diminishment. This is a man who freely flirts with, practically harasses, younger women in front of his daughter, who openly discourses on the evolutionary explanation for why men prefer women of a certain age and size and shape of ass. “Can’t you ever just act normal around any woman?” Laura asks him over lunch, to which her father replies, referring to a waitress, “She’s a ballet dancer. They love to be complimented.” Oh dad, you kidder.

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It’s worth saying outright that Felix seems jealous of Laura’s husband. Certainly he has a “men are men” lens on the world and, accordingly, figures Dean is cheating because men cheat. Because he, Felix, cheated. Hence what follows. The plot of On the Rocks is largely concerned with what happens when Laura enlists her father (or does he enlist himself?) in the hunt for answers about Dean. Plenty of bad choices are made. But what matters to this movie aren’t the plot points of their adventure so much as the why . What matters is that, after having left Laura’s mother many years ago to live the international player’s life — after proving to be an awful model, for young Laura, of what a father and husband can and should be — Felix is suddenly waryingly eager to be involved. Has he ever been this gung-ho about his daughter in his life? From Jones’s performance, one gathers not.

The power of Coppola’s film, and of Murray’s performance in particular, is that the answers to this why stack up with more and more implication and complication as the movie proceeds, without the movie overly pronouncing its intentions. Instead, Coppola proceeds as she usually does: with the veneer of a light touch in the construction of her scenes, and an attention to her characters’ lifestyle that never bleeds into self-seriousness. Visually, her work here isn’t as overtly stylish as it has been in the past. But the psychological swings she manages are canny and precise, informed — this being a comedy in form, if not always content — by the power of a quiet punchline. (Jenny Slate, as a motor-mouthed parent Laura cannot stand, is a pleasurably loud addition to the muted Coppola universe; she’s to this movie what Anna Faris’s karate-chopping movie starlet was to Lost in Translation .)

The question that drives this movie forward isn’t that of Dean’s possible infidelity, but rather of Felix’s intentions. Why does he suddenly care so much about the happiness of his now fully-adult, unhappily married daughter? Murray’s disarming wisdom and charm, anchored in a movie that keeps its plot slim and its best scenes robust, bump heads against the things that make his character despicable. The movie is all the more prickly and rich for having a man whose displays of power over women gross us out even as his personality, that smooth talking confidence, reels us in as effectively as the Sirens. Felix’s intentions, Murray shows us, have a little to do with his age and a bit more to do with the accompanying regret, even if he never quite confesses to it. The man knows that he set his daughter up. A man such as this, certain that daughters will ultimately marry men like (but of course lesser than) their fathers, accordingly has reason to believe that, when it comes to the promise of a happy marriage with a good man, his daughter is fucked.

Is it also possible that race is on Felix’s mind? Race — that unspoken subject, at least in this movie. There’s a scene here that doesn’t work for just that reason. It involves the police. The problem with the scene isn’t so much its sense of how a man as entitled and well-connected as Felix might react to being pulled over — that is to say, by having the upper hand and wielding it shamelessly — but rather in its sense of the way Laura might react to it all. Laura’s mother — Felix’s ex-wife — is black. Her husband is black. (And, to the point about marrying one’s father, there’s some delicious irony in that fact.) Yet race is the one potential thing on Laura’s mind that On the Rocks potentially shortchanges. You believe the “Oh, Dad ” bit when it comes to Felix talking about a woman’s ass, because, frankly, he’s always that guy. Cops? Well, that’s different territory. The feelings Laura would plausibly have about all of this are notably absent. And so are Dean’s. The plot of this movie boils down, in some ways, a white guy’s not-totally-justified suspicions of his daughter’s black husband. Does the movie know it? A glimmer in Wayans’s eye late in the movie, one of those looks that seem to summarize a thousand conflicting feelings at once, suggests that if the movie doesn’t totally own up to what might be going on here, Dean is most certainly not in the dark.

On the Rocks proves far wiser, and somehow diverting, as a portrait of a father’s clear but uncomfortable love for his daughter. By the end you may feel encouraged to recall the beginning, when, before we even see a single image, before we know anything about who Laura and Dean are, Felix reveals to us who he is. “And remember,” we hear him say. “Don’t give your heart to any boys. You’re mine — until you get married. Then you’re still mine.” In everything that follows, Felix proves how thoroughly he means this. The movie doesn’t redeem him, exactly. But there are lessons — for Felix and viewers both — in excavating just what it means.

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‘On the Rocks’ Review: Sofia Coppola Reunites with Bill Murray for a Fizzy Comedy About the Cost of Being Cool

David ehrlich.

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Don’t be fooled by the dusky seduction of its wedding night prologue: “ On the Rocks ” is far and away the least cool thing that Sofia Coppola has ever made. That’s not a criticism so much as a contextualization. If the perfume ad prelude cocoons you inside the same gauzy softness that made “ Lost in Translation ” so entrancing, “Marie Antoinette” so tactile, and “ Somewhere ” so tenderly siloed within itself, it only does so in order to cut a sharp contrast into the domesticity that follows. That’s when this fizzy champagne cocktail of a film jumps a few years forward, landing in the kind of marriage where the waters have become just a bit too calm for the people swimming in them to feel safe.

Laura ( Rashida Jones ) is a successful Manhattan author who’s hovering around 40 and struggling to reconcile her identity as an artist (Boundless! Unpredictable! Sexy!) with her new-ish role as a mother of two (anchored… chaotic… sexless). She starts casting some panicked looks to the shore after her husband Dean comes home from one of his constant business trips all clouded on Xanax and seems to confuse her for someone else as they kiss. The next morning, she finds another woman’s perfume in his toiletries. Hmm .

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It’s probably nothing, but this is one of those marriages where there’s just enough distance between two people for a little imagination to wedge its way into the gap. The only thing that stops Laura from having a full-on freak out is that she doesn’t seem to realize she’s in a Sofia Coppola movie, or that she’s a clear stand-in for a filmmaker whose body of work often sees marriage as the purgatorial first step in someone’s path towards her own self-understanding. It’s a Bressonian prison for a woman escaped (not for nothing, but the happiest marriage in Coppola’s first six films is between Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI).

In fairness to Laura, she doesn’t quite fit the profile of a typical Coppola heroine, and her life doesn’t totally resemble the stuff of a typical Coppola movie. For one thing, there are Black people in it. As Laura, Jones — whose implosive poise and casual ability to throw on a Radarte sweatshirt like it’s from the Gap make her a natural proxy for her director — while Dean is brought to life by a subdued Marlon Wayans , excellent in an aloof but full-bodied performance that reaffirms Coppola’s understated genius for outside-the-box casting. (James Woods is almost as good in “The Virgin Suicides” as he is bad in real life.) Race itself is only an ambient concept in the film, visible but not seen until an old white man weaponizes his privilege to get out of a speeding ticket in a moment that reads more critical than carefree.

For another thing, Laura’s world is uncharacteristically recognizable, even for all of its super-characteristic wealth. She lives in a pre-COVID New York that already seems nostalgic for itself, and on a street that locals will know by sight. There’s a Bernie sticker on her door, and a Greenlight Bookstore tote bag hanging nearby. Her daughters are her best friends, her life is sound-tracked by jazz standards and breezy new Phoenix instrumentals (as opposed to incandescent My Bloody Valentine bangers and a mash of post-punk gems). It’s possible that Laura doesn’t even know Jason Schwartzman. At one point, A24 is even name-checked as a punchline to a sly joke about how out of the loop she’s become.

Laura isn’t thrust into an alien environment that somehow reveals the entropy of her own existence; she isn’t dropped off at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, dowered to the Palace of Versailles, or dragged into the pole dancing room below Paris Hilton’s mansion (even if most viewers will look at the floor-to-ceiling windows of Laura’s massive SoHo apartment with a similar awe and foreignness). The dislocation is coming from inside the house, and the only aspect of Laura’s home that she doesn’t recognize is herself. It isn’t until Bill Murray rolls up in the back seat of a private car — lowering the window with the bleary-eyed suaveness of someone who just came from shooting a whiskey commercial in Japan — that the Coppola of it all really clicks into place.

Imagine if Bob Harris learned all of the wrong lessons from his time getting “Lost in Translation” and you might have a good sense of how Murray shines as Felix, the caddish perma-bachelor of a father who Laura’s always known and never had. A charming asshole whose ascot is hardly the only thing about him that belongs to a world gone by (there’s also his attitude towards women), Felix swings in like a wrecking ball and starts filling Laura’s head with all sorts of paranoid nonsense about what Dean might be doing.

He’s a devil on his daughter’s shoulder, whispering in her ear that all men are as unreliable as he is, and goading her into accepting the idea that marriage and excitement are mutually exclusive. Maybe then she’ll understand why he never settled down. Why he hits on everything that moves. Why he skipped straight from “childless” to “cool grandpa.” The next things Laura knows, she’s riding shotgun in her dad’s vintage red Alfa Romeo — which crackles like a Roman candle every time Felix revs the engine — and tailing Dean on a series of caviar-fueled stakeouts. “You need to start thinking like a man,” he tells her.

As smooth as a block of ice melting into a martini at the 21 Club, “On the Rocks” reveals itself as a furtive sip of a story about an ultra-chic woman taking stock of her artistic currency at a time when most of her life is spent packing lunches and arranging playdates (thanks for the help, Dean). It’s the first Sofia Coppola movie that feels — if only during its flattest stretches — as if it could have been made by somebody else, and yet at the same time it also plays like the loose and tipsy self-portrait of a maturing filmmaker being visited by the ghost of her greatest success. “On the Rocks” is both as anonymous as the book that Laura’s afraid of writing, and as singular as the books that helped pay for the cavernous apartment where she’s afraid of writing it (whatever they might have been).

Of course, Felix may have paid her way until Laura was able to prove herself, but Coppola has never been shy when it comes to writing about what she knows, and this is very much the work of someone who grew up in the shadow of a larger-than-life figure whose heart she had to share with the darkness. But the “write what you know” approach has always been a double-edged sword for Coppola, whose films are lined with a diaphanous interiority that can make them feel like they were pulled from the soft tissue of your own self-consciousness, but can also make them feel insulated from a world full of real problems. “On the Rocks” is nothing if not a movie by someone who wanted to walk to set and be home for dinner every night.

Jones — who knows a thing or two about having an iconic father of her own — is a low-key delight to watch as Laura, but the scenes of her futzing around her apartment or feigning interest as a fellow mom (a very funny Jenny Slate) blabbers about the highs and lows of her roller-coaster love life wouldn’t be out of place in one of the TV dramedies that will be streaming alongside “On the Rocks” after the film makes its way to its forever home on Apple TV+. Whenever Felix enters the fray, however, the clocks turn back and suddenly it’s like someone could start doing karaoke to Roxy Music at any moment. (Watch the unbridled joy that “The Beguiled” cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd brings to the scenes of Murray driving through Manhattan, as that little Alfa Romeo rips through our memories of 8th Avenue like Brad Pitt speeding through late ’60s Los Angeles.) He’s an uptown guy with a downtown vibe, his daughter is the opposite, and there’s a combustible alchemy that comes from mixing them together as the movie careens around the island.

The unstable energy shift that comes from Laura exorcising her inner buzzkill is palpable enough to make a lot of the dialogue feel redundant. This is Coppola’s chattiest film to date, and she doesn’t get the same mileage out of stilted cocktail talk as she does from the raw expressiveness of her moods; a Monty Python-esque bit of Felix and Laura backing out of a party says more about their relationship than most of the things they actually say to each other.

But even without the karaoke, Murray is able to make a lot of this material sing. It’s wild to think that the real-life father of six has starred in more films about the absurdity of being a dad (e.g. “Broken Flowers,” “The Life Aquatic”) than he has in movies where he’s actually played one (“Lost in Translation” technically counts, though the children are off-camera and on the other side of the planet). But his freewheeling screen persona has never squared with having a family, and Coppola loves him like a step-dad for that. This is a role that Murray could pull off in his sleep, but he wouldn’t do that here. His performance is familiar but steeped in the bittersweet recognition that Laura is the love of Felix’s life — that he’d rather them shipwreck together than sail apart on their own.

The great strength of “On the Rocks” is that it doesn’t ask Felix (or Murray) to change: It’s a lightly carbonated story about the danger of trying to reverse the tide when life wants you to swim with the currents, and it’s less interested in how people change than it is in what they cling to. That might explain why Coppola strains to contrive a way to wrap things up; why her last film with Murray conveyed a blowout fight in just a few cutting words (“Wasn’t there anyone else there to lavish you with attention?”), while this one fizzles out during a long scene that overwhelms the dénouement it’s meant to tee up, and then ends with a shrug that makes the whole movie feel more tossed off than it was.

“On the Rocks” isn’t destined to achieve the same kind of iconic status as some of Coppola’s previous work. It isn’t disposable, but it also doesn’t offer anything to obsess about, which is a real change of pace for a filmmaker who launched a zillion Tumblrs and Pinterest boards and gave humanity the gif of Emma Watson saying “I wanna rob.” It isn’t an uncool movie, but it isn’t a cool one either, and by the time it winds down with a needle drop that might have you second-guessing that assessment, you might just be as cool with that as Coppola seems to be.

“On the Rocks” premiered at the 2020 New York Film Festival. It will be released in theaters on Friday, October 2, and will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting on Friday, October 23.

As new movies open in theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic, IndieWire will continue to review them whenever possible. We encourage readers to follow the safety precautions provided by CDC and health authorities. Additionally, our coverage will provide alternative viewing options whenever they are available.

Movie Review: On the Rocks (2020)

Howard Schumann
Movie Reviews
No responses
--> December 22, 2020

“Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” — William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”

Film critic Roger Ebert once said, “All good art is about something deeper than it admits.” On the surface, Sofia Coppola’s (“ The Beguiled ”) On the Rocks is a light comedy about a playboy father and anxiety-ridden daughter snooping on a husband suspected of cheating. The title could refer to Scotch (or Bourbon) on the rocks, a ship foundering off a seacoast, or the downward trajectory of a relationship. In this case, it may be all three. With Bill Murray (“ Rock the Kasbah ”) as the sleuthing dad, Rashida Jones (“ Tag ”) as the suspecting wife, and Marlon Wayans (“ The Heat ”) as the would-be philanderer, on first glance, the film seems to be headed towards sitcom territory, another Woody Allen-Lite tale of over-indulged and well-connected New Yorkers (with a person of color thrown in to avoid stereotyping).

A witty and affecting script by Coppola and busloads of chemistry between the two main protagonists, however, reveals depths that transcend such superficial judgments. Describing the film, Coppola says, “It’s the clash between the two generations . . . how they look at relationships, and also how your relationship with your parents affects your relationships in your life.” Speaking of her famous father, Francis Ford, Coppola says, “It’s not my dad’s personality. It’s not my dad. But of course, you draw on things from life to try to make it feel real and connected.” Laura (Jones) has, in her own mind anyway, some reason to believe that her husband Dean (Wayans) is looking elsewhere to fulfill his physical and emotional needs.

A writer who has been unable to put anything meaningful on paper while she juggles her two young children’s day in school, preschool, and ballet classes, Laura feels lonely and estranged from her oft-traveling husband. Her suspicions are enhanced by Dean’s attention to his “working” relationship with co-worker Fiona (Jessica Henwick, “Love and Monsters”) and bells go off when she finds a bottle of expensive body lotion in his suitcase. Laura is so preoccupied that she has tuned out others looking for support, particularly her friend Vanessa (Jenny Slate, “ The Sunlit Night ”), a single mom who is seeking advice about finding a boy friend in the New York scene. As they line up every day to drop off and pick up their children from Kindergarten, her attempts to engage Laura in conversation are met only with blank stares.

It seems a bit out of character when Laura calls upon her wealthy art-dealer dad Felix (Murray) to give her advice as to how to handle the Dean situation. This especially raises eyebrows since the very same father is an obsessive womanizer who left her and her mother for another woman when she was a child. Knowing Murray as we do, however, we fall prey to his sly wit and the film rises and falls on the basis of his considerable strengths. Coppola says, “He has so much heart and he’s so funny and in a way that is so unique to him,” yet it is Rashida Jones who, insecure and vulnerable, provides the human touch, mirroring the truth of their relationship and her engagement in a confrontation with Felix, though low-key is nonetheless powerful.

Felix assumes, since he wants a relationship with almost every woman he meets, that every man is the same and Dean must be guilty, without concrete evidence of course, only suspicions. Felix becomes an updated version of “Columbo” as he stakes out Dean’s comings and goings in New York, aided by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd (“La Traviata”). He eats caviar along the way as a quick lunch, hides in alleyways, takes in the scenic delights of the city in his convertible sports car that has seen better days and, in spite of Laura’s reluctance, the two end up in Manzanillo, Mexico in a scene that could have fit into any screwball comedy of the 1930s or 40s. Inclusion of pop songs of the era such as “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and “Mexicali Rose” adds to the connection. Equally hilarious is Felix’s confrontation with two police officers who pull him over for speeding, but who end up succumbing to his master class in charm and giving his car a push.

Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola’s last collaboration, “Lost in Translation,” was about a connection in a foreign country that hinted at romance, but while Bill Murray’s trademark dry humor was present and his character was jaded enough, neither character experienced anything deeper about themselves or the world around them. In On the Rocks , however, each person has the opportunity and the inner strength to look deeper and develop a new sense of understanding and trust. Here, Laura re-evaluates her priorities in life and her relationship with her father, taking responsibility for what works and what does not. As she looks inward, she heeds the words of poet Charles Bukowski to “Drink from the well of your self and begin again” or, as Chilean author Pablo Neruda put it, “To have lived through one solitude to arrive at another, to feel oneself many things and recover wholeness.”

Tagged: daughter , father , investigation , marriage , New York City , writer

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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On the rocks, common sense media reviewers.

Coppola's relationship dramedy has sex, strong language.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Positive messages about need for better communicat

Laura is a caring and loving mother, wife, daughte

A man passionately kisses his wife but then abrupt

Strong language includes an F-bomb-filled Chris Ro

High-end luxury brands like Rodarte, Mercedes, Car

Adults drink socially, at parties, restaurants, an

Positive Messages

Positive messages about need for better communication, teamwork, perseverance in relationships, whether between couples or between children and parents. Iffy messages (courtesy of Felix) about monogamy, fidelity, marriage in general.

Positive Role Models

Laura is a caring and loving mother, wife, daughter. She wants to make her marriage work and find an outlet for her creative energy. Felix is attentive to his daughter but isn't a believer in fidelity or monogamy. Dean is a hardworking, if not always observant, husband and father. Central cast includes diverse representations.

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A man passionately kisses his wife but then abruptly stops. He tries to seduce her another time (while shirtless), but they're interrupted by their kids. Several women flirt with Felix, who makes many references to his daughter about why men are "made" to cheat. From a distance, one character appears to flirt with another. In an early scene, a groom gets into a pool and beckons his bride to join him; she undresses down to her underwear and hops in.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes an F-bomb-filled Chris Rock routine Laura watches on TV: "f--k," "f--king," "f--ked," as well as "s--t," "damn," "ass," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

High-end luxury brands like Rodarte, Mercedes, Cartier.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink socially, at parties, restaurants, and bars, occasionally to excess.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that On the Rocks is award-winning writer-director Sofia Coppola 's dramedy about a married woman ( Rashida Jones ) who teams up with her eccentric father ( Bill Murray ) to investigate whether her husband ( Marlon Wayans ) is having an affair. There's some mature conversation about adult relationships, marriage, fidelity, monogamy, and adultery. The stability of an established marriage is the main theme of the movie, but the relationship between a father and his adult daughter is also explored. Strong language, while infrequent, includes a clip from a famous Chris Rock routine, with several uses of "f--k," and there are glimpses or discussions of high-end luxury brands like Mercedes, Cartier, and Rodarte. While nothing gets too racy, there are lots of conversations about sex, intimacy, and what drives people (men in particular) to commit adultery. Characters drink, sometimes to excess. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (1)
Kids say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

it's not anything kids can't handle, my 7 yr old just didn't understand all of it.

What's the story.

In writer-director Sofia Coppola 's dramedy ON THE ROCKS, Laura ( Rashida Jones ), a New York City writer and married mother of two, starts to suspect that her workaholic husband, Dean ( Marlon Wayans ), might be having an affair with his assistant. Worried that their love life is, like the title says, on shaky ground, Laura is encouraged by her rich, quirky, and notoriously womanizing father, Felix ( Bill Murray ), to spy on Dean and confirm that her suspicions aren't just paranoia. After all, as Felix points out repeatedly, males just aren't biologically conditioned to be monogamous. With her dad's help, Laura starts to snoop, follow, and investigate whether Dean is telling her the truth about his whereabouts.

Is It Any Good?

Jones and the always entertaining Murray have a charming rapport, and the supporting characters all stand out, but Coppola's marriage-in-the-city dramedy is thinner than expected. Part caper, part relationship drama, part slice-of-life look at how privileged, 30-something New Yorkers deal with their marriages and children, the movie can be fun, particularly once Murray appears on-screen to chew up the scenery with his charm. But audiences expecting Marriage Story -level revelations should be warned: On the Rocks isn't nearly as substantive -- or heartbreaking. That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course, because that can be exhausting for a viewer, but Coppola is capable of extraordinary films, and this one falls short in comparison with others in her filmography.

On its own merits, the movie shines brightest when it's focused solely on Laura and Felix -- since Dean is too busy working and possibly having an affair to be a fully fleshed-out character. Another one of the best parts of the movie is the hilarious daily interaction between Laura and an oversharing, socially clueless mother (played by Jenny Slate ) at her child's preschool. Slate's character, who's single, is all too eager to regale a put-upon Laura with every thought in her head about her love life. Laura, meanwhile, doesn't seem to have actual friends. Instead, she tells her father intimate details about her marriage. While that doesn't feel quite believable, Murray is a delight, as always, even as he tries to give anthropological and biological rationale for infidelity (including his own). For a well-acted and frothy dramedy, On the Rocks is just right, but it's not the sort of Coppola film that stays with you after the credits roll.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how On the Rocks depicts marital relationships in general. Why do you think topics such as affairs, divorce, sex , and monogamy are dealt with so frequently in movies and popular culture?

How is socioeconomic class depicted in the movie? How does Felix's privilege make him charming and help him get out of trouble? Would everyone be able to pull that off? Why, or why not?

Do you consider anyone in the movie a role model ? What character strengths do they display? Which personality traits do you think are most important?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 2, 2020
On DVD or streaming : October 23, 2020
Cast : Rashida Jones , Bill Murray , Marlon Wayans
Director : Sofia Coppola
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
Studios : A24 , Apple TV+
Genre : Comedy
Character Strengths : Perseverance
Run time : 96 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some language/sexual references
Last updated : February 18, 2023

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Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – On the Rocks (2020)

September 26, 2020 by Robert Kojder

On the Rocks . 2020

Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola Starring Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans, Jessica Henwick, Jenny Slate, Liyanna Muscat, Alexandra Mary Reimer, Anna Reimer, Barbara Bain, Juliana Canfield, Alva Chinn, Mike Keller, Musto Pelinkovicci, Zoe Bullock, Chase Sui Wonders, Elizabeth Guindi, Jules Willcox, and Ximena Lamadrid

A young mother reconnects with her larger-than-life playboy father on an adventure through New York.

Initially, it’s strange that from press releases to the casting list itself, Bill Murray receives top billing and priority for a movie centering on a middle-aged author with writer’s block who also happens to be stressed out and suspecting that something is off within her marriage. When you sit down and actually watch On the Rocks (the latest feature from writer/director Sofia Coppola, once again collaborating with the aforementioned legendary Illinois born-and-bred comedian), the marketing becomes more clear as it’s one of Bill Murray’s strongest roles in recent memory. Not to take away anything from the rest of the cast and story, but his character is certain to be what sticks with audiences most

One night Laura (Rashida Jones, who is also quite good here) starts reciprocating physical affection from her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans, having somewhat of an Adam Sandler moment reminding us all once again that he is a terrific actor when he actually wants to be a part of something substantial, which is apparently once every decade and a half) upon his return from a London work trip. Unfortunately, it’s short-lived as he conks out on the bed shortly after, but weirdly enough it’s at the same time Laura vocalizes some of that affection. It’s as if Dean was so jetlagged and out of it, he was expecting her to be another woman.

Laura is not ready to hit the panic button right away; after all, Dean is still good with the kids and expresses that he does care even if he is busy most of the time. Nevertheless, she brings up the situation to her estranged father Felix (Bill Murray) who rather than showing concern almost feels excited by the possibility of some marital drama. When we are introduced to the character proper, Felix turns out to be a sexist, regressive thinking cynic who would be loathsome if it didn’t come in the form of Bill Murray’s undeniable charm. For as gross as some of his beliefs are (he frequently brings up odd beliefs that he pedals as both intellectually factual knowledge and a means to affirm his chauvinistic ideology), it’s sort of exactly what Laura needs to get in the mindset of Dean and figure out if all men really do have a one-track mind of lust with the incapability of happily sticking with one woman for eternity.

As Laura’s suspicions become stronger (she finds some belongings of a female coworker inside Dean’s luggage that he explains away as her not having enough space), she relays the information to Felix who in turn becomes more and more skeptical and amusingly unhinged as he goes as far as hiring a private detective to spy on Dean. It’s also made clear that Felix was no father or husband of the year himself, and that he is actually lonely inside, so as the hijinks ensue it becomes more of a question of does Felix really believe his daughter is being cheated on and how far is he willing to go to buy some more time with his daughter. There’s a light approach to this serious material, but it gels with Bill Murray’s performance as a lovable slimeball; it’s not long before father and daughter are going on stakeouts and finding themselves involved in police encounters that, of course, Felix can smooth talk his way out.

Whether or not On the Rocks attempts to heighten the drama too little or too late is another discussion entirely, but eventually the film and Laura does condemn Felix’s characteristics as pathetic. And that’s because they are. He’s the life of the party that’s never really grown up or set aside his selfishness. Despite that, watching father and daughter reconnect for these misadventures is actually sweet and occasionally hilarious. It doesn’t really matter whether Dean turns out to be committing adultery or not, as we just hope all of these people can grow as individuals and find their own happiness. It’s breezy work from Sofia Coppola that could probably stand to hit harder emotionally, but it does still hit while giving its three central performers fantastic material.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, friend me on Facebook, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , check out my personal non-Flickering Myth affiliated Patreon , or email me at [email protected]

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On the Rocks

Comedy , Drama

Content Caution

Bill Murray and Rashida Jones ride in a convertible in On the Rocks.

In Theaters

Rashida Jones as Laura; Bill Murray as Felix; Marlon Wayans as Dean; Jessica Henwick as Fiona; Jenny Slate as Vanessa Barbara Bain as Gran

Home Release Date

October 23, 2020
Sofia Coppola

Distributor

Apple TV+, A24

Movie Review

The kiss bothered her.

Come to think of it, the kiss itself was quite nice. Dean staggered in from a long business trip, tired and blurry. He practically fell in bed and gave his wife a long, romantic, passionate smooch—one so romantic and so passionate that Laura had almost forgotten what it felt like.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said, blinking—as if just realizing where he was. Dean stood up, walked out of the bedroom, and the moment was over.

It was if Dean thought that Laura was someone else.

Had it not been for the kiss, Laura might’ve not thought much about the woman’s toiletry bag she found in Dean’s suitcase the next morning—stocked, she saw, with body oil. (Dean says it was his assistant Fiona’s: He offered to carry it in his suitcase because she couldn’t put it in her carry-on.) She probably wouldn’t have worried about how pretty Fiona was, or how chummy she and Dean seemed to be at a party for Dean’s fledgling company.

And even with all that in play, Laura might not have shrugged her unease off if she’d felt more like herself—or, at least, the person whom Dean married all those years ago. Young. Beautiful. Confident. Talented.

Laura doesn’t feel like any of those things these days. She spends her mornings and afternoons shuffling her two daughters to school and ballet lessons. The time between, she stares at her computer screen—a writer who can’t write. When Dean looks at her, does he still see the woman he married? Or, as she confesses to a friend, “just the buzzkill that schedules things”?

She needs some advice from someone who loves her. Someone who knows her frontways and back. Someone who has insight into the male mind and understands the wandering eye.

She needs to talk with her father, Felix. Because if anyone understands cheating husbands, it’d be him.

Just ask Mom.

Positive Elements

Felix has plenty of weaknesses. But his biggest? His daughter. In a Lazy-Susan life filled with rotating women, Laura’s been his one-and-only constant, and he’d do pretty much anything for her.

Laura loves her pops, too, even if Felix can be exasperating. She grits her teeth when he makes a pass at a woman (and he seems to make passes at all of them). She rolls her eyes with every anthropological male-female relational factoid he blurts out. But Laura sees his considerable charm, too. And, of course, she sees how much he loves her. When the rest of her family turned their backs on Felix, Laura alone still embraced him. And their quirky, squabbly, father-daughter bond is occasionally a beautiful thing.

But Laura loves her husband, too. She loves the family they’ve built together. She wants to believe her hubby—even as she lets her dad talk her into an escalating game of surveillance.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Laura’s initial faith in her husband proves warranted. Dean loves his wife. And while he might be guilty of some ill-considered birthday gifts and taking his wife for granted, he remains as faithful as ever. While the road to discovery and reconciliation turns pretty rocky, Laura learns some valuable lessons along the way. She also gives her father a good, timely talking-to about the importance of personal responsibility.

Spiritual Elements

When it comes to male-female relationships, Felix scraps Cupid in favor of Darwin. “Males are [biologically] forced to dominate and to impregnate all females,” he tells Laura over lunch. He adds that men’s sexual predilections for certain types of females (smaller, higher voiced and with “little to no beard”) were developed when “humans walked on all fours.”

Felix also chides Laura for not wanting to celebrate her birthday. “The celebration of the day of one’s birth was originally a pagan tradition,” he says. “Christians originally didn’t celebrate it for exactly that reason. Now, we’re past that, aren’t we?”

Laura and Felix drive by an impressive cathedral.

Sexual Content

We first meet Laura and Dean during their wedding. The two are enduring the wedding banquet when Dean decides to pull Laura away and into the bowels of the hotel. In the scene, Dean lounges in a swimming pool as Laura walks toward the water wearing just her veil and birthday suit. (We see Laura’s backside, slightly obscured by her diaphanous veil, before she runs and jumps in.)

That’s the only blatant sexual scene in the film, though obviously sex and fidelity form the hook from which the plot all hangs.

In addition to the kiss discussed in the introduction, Laura and Dean kiss several more times in the movie, though most are merely pecks on the mouth. Laura speculates about the body oil she finds in Dean’s suitcase and checks his phone for incriminating texts. Eventually, she and Felix begin tailing Dean all around New York City and beyond.

Felix points to an alleged double standard when it comes to infidelity. “Why is it that when a woman has an affair, it’s ‘so wonderful she found someone,’ but if a man has an affair, he’s ‘banging his secretary’?”

Felix has a vested interest in a sympathetic answer to the above. He had an affair of his own that broke up Laura’s happy family. (Laura accuses her dad of forcing her, as a kid, to “keep your secrets.”)

When Laura accuses her father of hitting on every woman they see, that seems pretty close to the truth. He compliments waitresses, ballet instructors and women he simply walks by, often staring at them for a beat-and-a-half too long. When they run into a “client” of Felix’s at a restaurant, he stands up to greet her, and the two stand about six inches apart—suggesting that their relationship wasn’t purely business. Laura calls Felix when her dad’s in Paris: She overhears Felix asking an unseen someone if that’s a birthmark he sees, again hinting at an intimate encounter.

Felix insists that men are genetically disposed to sleeping around, arguing that “monogamy in marriage is based on the concept of property” and that bangle bracelets are a holdover from when women were “owned” by men. He does note some exceptions to the rule of male dominance, though: Bonobo chimpanzee societies are headed by females, and he mentions a Canadian cult in which women hold men captive. If they ever show an urge to leave, the women encourage them to stay through sex. (Laura quips that it sounds more like Felix’s ultimate fantasy.)

We hear descriptive, but relatively clinical, conversation about female body parts. A “friend” of Laura’s talks constantly about the sexual relationship she’s having. (In the end, her paramour is discovered to be married, and the woman ends the affair.) We see women in nightgowns and bathrobes. Felix convinces Laura to act like his girlfriend to throw off a hotel security guard. (“This is truly a new low,” Laura tells him.) On television, a stand-up comic talks about how marriage is the death-knell of a certain form of intimacy. We see a couple of guys go shirtless. There’s an allusion to a vaguely masochistic relationship that Felix was involved with.

Violent Content

Crude or profane language.

Three f-words—all during a televised comic’s stand-up routine. We also hear one s-word, and one or two uses of a few other milder profanities. God’s name is misused at least eight times, and Jesus’ name is abused once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Laura and Felix both drink frequently during the film, though not excessively, it seems. During lunch, Felix orders a “Cutty on the rocks” for himself and a “Bombay martini for the kid.” Martinis seem to be a particularly popular beverage for both; beer and wine are both served during meals and get-togethers, too.

When the two are tailing Dean and his assistant to parts unknown, they’re pulled over by police. One of them notices a bottle of liquor in the car, but Felix tells them that it’s unopened: He and Laura were going to save it for later.

Felix smokes a cigar.

Other Negative Elements

Certainly, Dean does not follow the “Billy Graham Rule” of business: He and his coworker, Fiona, spend a great deal of time together, sometimes unchaperoned.

For many, that would be a “negative element” right there, but it also precipitates other negative behavior: A suspicious Laura, instead of confronting Dean or talking the matter through, decides to spy on her husband instead—encouraged by her well-meaning-but-duplicitous father.

And even when she wants to talk it out with Dean, Felix persuades her not to. “At some point we can make a decision about whether to tap his phone,” the well-connected Felix says. Not exactly great to build the trust that all good marriages are built on.

Whether or not Dean is having an affair is, in On the Rocks , almost beside the point. But the story’s still a love triangle: husband, wife … and Dad.

As Laura frets over her husband’s suspected activities, Felix flings himself into the investigation with gusto. He hires private detectives. He convinces Laura to tail her own husband. Even though Laura’s marriage hangs in the balance, these stakeouts become great daddy-daughter time for Felix—a chance to be with, perhaps, the only woman he ever truly loved.

“Can you act just a little less excited about this?!” Laura tells him.

I get it. As a dad of a grown-and-married daughter, I know just how precious that time with your little girl can be.

The Bible doesn’t waste any time in laying out the hierarchy of what family looks like, though. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh,” Gen. 2:24 says. That goes for daughters, too. While moms and dads can still be a huge part of their kids’ lives, they’re not running the show anymore. That’s something that Laura and Felix both learn. Viewers can learn it, too—and On the Rocks makes the lesson relatively painless.

The film, directed by Sofia Coppola and anchored by Parks and Recreation’ s Rashida Jones and quasi-national treasure Bill Murray, is a quirky, comical look at marriage and family. And while it earns its R rating, it’s almost by technicality. Take out about a minute of content—three f-words uttered by a TV comic and a glimpse of a veiled, bare backside—and this would land in PG-13 territory, easy.

That doesn’t mean On the Rocks is suitable for kids, of course. Given that the entire movie is predicated on infidelity (or the possibility thereof), it most certainly isn’t. But for adults navigating their own important, sometimes prickly relationships, On the Rocks is filled with teachable moments, cautionary scenes and plenty of discussion points. Sure, the film is rocky in spots. But the ride is smoother than you might expect.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘On the Rocks’ on Apple TV+, a Delightful Comedy Buoyed by the Ever-Lovin’ Bill Murray

Where to stream:.

On the Rocks
Sofia Coppola

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Stream it or skip it: ‘priscilla’ on max, sofia coppola's contemplative antidote to elvis extravaganzaism, new movies on streaming: 'priscilla' + more, 'priscilla' comes to digital, but when will it be streaming on max.

Tell me you don’t want to see another Sofia Coppola-Bill Murray reunion, and I’ll call you a liar. On the Rocks , now on Apple TV+, pairs the elusive and beloved comic star with the director of his greatest performance, A Very Murray Christmas ( Lost in Translation is OBVIOUSLY a very close second). The magic of those films aren’t likely to be replicated — nor will anyone in their right mind try — but even if On the Rocks kindles a few sparks of classic Murray charm, it’ll be worth watching.

ON THE ROCKS : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: New York, New York, Newwww Yorrrrrrrrrrrrrrk: Laura (Rashida Jones) is a good mom, a struggling writer and an uncertain wife, and it all adds up to her not feeling like herself lately. Her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) works and works and works, frequently traveling hither and yon to wine and dine clients, building his rapidly growing company. That leaves Laura to schlep their oldest daughter to school and coerce their youngest daughter to take naps so she can use her precious few quiet moments to meticulously arrange the items on her desk while her laptop sits open, its blank screen taunting the room.

Her disconnect with Dean is the primary source of her discontent. His closest co-worker is Fiona (Jessica Henwick), described by Laura’s father as “the one with all the legs.” We’ll get back to her dad in a moment — we have to, since he’s played by Bill Murray. Anyway she has good reason to be concerned about Fiona, who’s kind of touchy-touchy with Dean, and her body oil ended up in his luggage. But that’s because her carry-on bag was full and he forgot to give it back when they got home from a business trip, he tells Laura. Would you be incredulous? At least a little bit, I bet.

Does Laura have someone to confide in about this? Not really — one of the other moms she knows from school (Jenny Slate) chatters on and on and on about the droning minutiae of her own life, and Laura just nods and endures and submits to her inability to get an edgewise word. So she confides in her pops, Felix, a charming and moneyed slickster with a full-time chauffeur who deals in high-end art and women. He has a whole spiel about how men evolved to procreate and further the species, and we get to hear Bill Murray say the word “haunches,” which, of course, is a delight.

There’s some dysfunction there of course, but Felix is a force of chaotic good. He knows how a cad operates, because he was and possibly is one. He boosts Laura’s spirits by taking her to Old New York classy bars for martinis — they sit at the same table where Bogart proposed to Bacall. He also insists on turning her suspicions about Dean into a quasi-spy operation complete with binocular stakeouts, a car chase lifted from an old Hollywood caper and a private dick putting a “hot watch” on the guy. As you do.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: On the Rocks blends the understated heartsick aches of Lost in Translation with the NYC love letter that is Manhattan .

Performance Worth Watching: This is surely a top-10 Murray performance ever, maybe top five, depending on where you rank Garfield . Don’t overlook Jones though, who not only enjoys a delightful chemistry with her co-star, but also quietly conveys Laura’s simmering stew of frustration and melancholy.

Memorable Dialogue: Felix: “Women — you can’t live with ’em, you can’t live without ’em. That doesn’t mean you have to live with ’em.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It’s a simple moment that brings On the Rocks home: A close-up on Jones, her brow furrowed with sad worry, and Murray’s voice, buttered with calm, sympathetic assurance, says, “You’re gonna be all right, shorty.” It’s perfectly modulated by the actors, perfectly nurtured by Coppola, perfectly touching. It’s just perfect.

It’s also a perfect example of the tone Coppola targets — mostly light with hints of heft, neatly sidestepping the gloomy despair lurking in the periphery. The film is an alchemical spritzer this side of madcap and that side of melodramatic. It’s funny, clever, a little bit silly, and exquisitely scripted with hints of truth about the complexities of marriage. Wayans’ performance is flat and awkward, and the ending is pat, the conflict too easily resolved. But these are beside-the-point nitpicks, because we come for Murray, are buoyed by the promise of another Coppola enchantment and stay for Jones, who flouts the screenplay’s persistent fluffiness and makes us truly care about what happens.

Murray is extraordinary, of course, bemused, flippant, sly, absolutely bullseyeing the sweet spot between wise and wiseass. His Felix has the softened tones of a father who knows he can’t really help his daughter’s situation improve, but is absolutely capable of getting her to vacate her own head for a while. Which may be the reason the movie exists: escapism with a hint of substance.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Some will ding On the Rocks for being flimsy, but they’re just killjoys. It’s a sweet and flaky cinematic aperitif, amusing yet smart, and a frequently delightful treat.

Should you stream or skip Sofia Coppola's #OnTheRocks on @AppleTV +? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) October 23, 2020

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba .

Stream On the Rocks on Apple TV+

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clock This article was published more than 3 years ago

‘On the Rocks’ has all the right ingredients: Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Sofia Coppola. But it’s a flavorless dish.

I always have a reporter’s notebook at the ready when I review a movie, just in case I want to jot down a telling visual detail, snippet of dialogue or revealing actorly gesture. After watching “On the Rocks,” Sofia Coppola’s latest urban picaresque, all I had was a blank page.

In this cocktail peanut of a movie, Rashida Jones plays Laura, a would-be writer living in a spacious Soho loft with her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) and their two gorgeous daughters. Like many harried married couples, Laura and Dean’s relationship has morphed from fun and sex (an early scene observes them escaping their wedding reception to take a spontaneous dip in a club swimming pool) to supply chains and logistics: Who’s going to get the kids to school? Who’s going to go to the store and cook dinner? When are you leaving for that business trip? Who are you again?

It’s when Laura begins to suspect that Dean is having an affair with an attractive work associate that her father Felix shows up. A wealthy art dealer and storied boulevardier, Felix knows the name of every maitre d’ in Manhattan, reflexively flirts with every waitress and coyly encourages Laura’s worst fears. Soon, the two are tooling around the city, following Dean and engaging in some overdue father-daughter bonding.

Did I mention that Felix is played by Bill Murray? With this setup, and this cast, “On the Rocks” has all the makings of a classic Sofia Coppola movie, in which characters are set adrift amid a captivatingly hermetic environment. But in this case, the kind of discursive mood piece that Coppola has perfected over her 21-year directing career turns into something surprisingly inert and uninvolved.

The most lively moments of “On the Rocks” don't belong to Jones or Murray but to Jenny Slate, who pops up throughout the film as an amusingly self-involved mom-friend of Laura’s. But even those bits are little more than cliches cadged straight from the Carrie Fisher handbook. Wayans’s Dean never comes into full focus, instead flitting in and out of the proceedings as dictated by Coppola’s schematic plot. “On the Rocks” might have been an intriguing emotional triangle between two men competing for the respect and affection of the woman they both adore, but this one is missing its hypotenuse.

As for Jones and Murray, they exude wry, lived-in familiarity but it’s there that credibility ends. What has made Coppola’s films so distinctive in the past is their hothouse specificity: Whether she’s immersing viewers in a repressed middle-class household or a posh Tokyo hotel or Versailles, she is masterful at conveying not just the material culture of a place and time, but its emotional weather. New York, it seems, has finally bested her: In “On the Rocks,” the city is virtually unrecognizable, denuded of people and human energy; Laura and Felix make their way through streets that are suspiciously empty, and into the kind of too-pretty upper class redoubts that recall the surface gloss of Woody Allen, but none of his acute observational wit.

Things happen in “On the Rocks,” but the caper-flick high jinks viewers expect to ensue never come to full, cockeyed fruition. Murray’s signature deadpan delivery will please his fans, but it doesn't quite line up with Felix’s expansive persona; he’s a kick in the pants, sure, but lacks the drill-down intensity of the most practiced seducer. He’s as lightweight as the scaffolding for a story that depends on a visit to Cartier for a plot point, not to mention a recurring role for the family chauffeur. “On the Rocks” wears its privilege like a spanking new seersucker jacket. It would be fun to watch as a slice of aspirational escapism if it seemed the least bit lived-in.

R. At the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema One Loudoun and Cinema Arts Theatre; available on Apple TV+ on Oct. 23. Contains some strong language and sexual references. 96 minutes.

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‘The Beach Boys’ Review: Rock Doc Focuses More on Good Vibrations Than New Insights

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The Big Picture

Heartfelt interviews with Brian Wilson & Al Jardine provide vulnerability & honesty from The Beach Boys.
The documentary is a love letter to Brian Wilson's genius and celebrates the band's iconic sound.
The film is entertaining with a great soundtrack, but lacks depth in covering the band's later years.

As an unabashed fan of the iconic band, it’s more than safe to say that I was highly anticipating The Beach Boys documentary . Rock docs have become increasingly common in the streaming era, and while a fair share of films feel too sugary and superfluous, you can at least expect to hear some great tunes. It was only a matter of time before the Southern Californian band got an official documentary of their own, especially considering their increasingly fascinating history.

While the incredibly underrated biopic Love & Mercy gave us an inside look into the mind of Brian Wilson , both in the ‘60s and the ‘80s, this documentary follows a much more traditional format. Frank Marshall & Thom Zimny ’s new doc recounts the rise of the iconic music group, the creation of the masterpiece known as Pet Sounds , and what led to their devastating split. Anyone who knows anything about The Beach Boys likely raised their eyebrows when they learned that the ever-polarizing Mike Love would be highly involved in the film, although it's hard not to be excited about something new coming from one of the greatest American bands to ever take the stage.

The Beach Boys (2024)

The Beach Boys is a celebration of the legendary band that revolutionized pop music, and the iconic, harmonious sound they created that personified the California dream, captivating fans for generations and generations to come.

'The Beach Boys' Doc Is Enjoyable, Despite Playing Things a Little Too Safe

The Beach Boys have a vast history, one that can be stretched out far beyond this movie’s nearly two-hour runtime. For the majority of the film, this doc is highly entertaining and heartfelt , particularly in the moments where it allows the band members to get vulnerable in their interviews. It’s hard not to shed a tear when seeing Al Jardine speak about his friendship with the Wilson brothers or during the brief but exceptional interview with Brian Wilson in modern-day. Other moments where the musicians talk about how their initial jealousy of The Beatles led to some of their greatest work also feel much more humbling.

It’s true that documentaries like The Beach Boys can often feel very sanitized, wanting to portray their subjects as saints who have never held an ounce of cynicism towards anyone or anything. Many of the interviews with Love do exert that feeling, including a moment where Love practically claims that he saved the music group . Other moments feel more raw and honest, including a moment where Love talks about some of his regrets as to how things went down between him and Brian Wilson.

Throughout the documentary, you can’t help but wonder if Dennis Wilson ’s interactions with Charles Manson will be brought up, especially since this is a Disney+ original . Manson and Dennis' awkward relationship is discussed but not until the documentary’s last half-hour, where Brian and Love’s legal battles, Dennis and Carl Wilson ’s deaths, and the band’s string of flops are also touched on, but glossed over. That isn’t to say that the documentary sidelines every single story that may be perceived as too dark, as the abuse the brothers suffered at the hands of their father and manager, Murry Wilson, is given some time in the limelight, as well as talking about Murry’s abusive upbringing.

The main fault of The Beach Boys is that as extensive as the film is about the first decade and a half of the musicians’ careers, the finale feels rushed and dissatisfying , outside of one heartfelt moment towards the end that you’ll just have to see for yourself.

‘The Beach Boys’ Doc Is a Love Letter to Brian Wilson’s Genius

While it is insanely easy to nitpick many of Love’s interviews throughout The Beach Boys , the documentary, at its very core, is a love letter to Brian Wilson’s genius and the unconventional way he created his art. However, the film never goes too in-depth about the creation of albums either, such as the unfinished album Smile , whose development could have been an entire documentary itself.

Make no mistake, this documentary brings up Love and Brian’s complicated relationship, but the filmmakers feel much more inclined to have the movie serve as a celebration rather than a tell-all. That’s not a bad thing. The Beach Boys’ discography is like a soundtrack for the summer season. After all, is it Memorial Day without the smell of barbecue and “Don’t Worry Baby,” playing in the background? This documentary is just like that, for fans like myself, you are not going to learn much new about the band, but the energy the movie exerts is hard to resist.

Outside of interviews with the surviving band members, the documentary also features conversations with artists such as Janelle Monáe and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder . While both of these interviews do a good job of explaining how The Beach Boys’ work influenced their music, the information itself doesn’t add anything to the documentary as a whole. Monáe’s presence is too brief to add an impact to anything and Tedder’s stories just don’t have as much of a connection to the documentary’s themes. Only Lindsey Buckingham and Don Was ’ interviews add genuine insight to the film about the band’s reach across the world and how they were introduced to the music industry.

There was a lot of potential for the first fully authorized documentary on The Beach Boys and while there were some elements here that left me disappointed as a lifelong fan, I still found myself to be constantly entertained throughout. Dealing with Love's hyperbole was inevitably going to be present regardless, especially because you can't fully tell the story of the band without him. The actual missed opportunity was for this new documentary to say something new, at least for those mega-fans. For those who simply enjoy the work of The Beach Boys, this will easily be far more enjoyable and entertaining. For viewers like me, it's a good two hours where you can just sit back and enjoy the music.

While hardcore fans won't learn anything they didn't already know, 'The Beach Boys' documentary is a perfectly entertaining love-letter to the SoCal band.

There are several heartfelt interviews with Brian Wilson and Al Jardine.
The soundtrack is, as expected, a collection of some of the music group's best.
The Beach Boys themselves are allowed to be vulernable and honest in their interviews.
A little too much Mike Love.
The documentary barely touches upon The Beach Boys' later years.

The Beach Boys is now available to stream on Disney+.

Watch on Disney+

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On the Rocks (2020)
Rated: 4/5 Feb 15, 2021 Full Review Shadan Larki InSession Film On The Rocks is the movie equivalent of a perfect fall treat, warm and comforting. And very much worthy of your time.
On the Rocks movie review & film summary (2020)
More time would make this soufflé of a movie even richer. But, if you can look beyond the 90-minute runtime depriving this movie of a more satisfying conclusion, there is not simply "a lot to like," there's an embarrassment of riches crying out for perusal. "On the Rocks" is the kind of doodle only a truly skilled director could produce.
'On the Rocks' Review: Daddy Dearest and His Late Bloomer
On the Rocks Rated R for language, which is a ridiculous, Puritanical call. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In select theaters, and on Apple TV Plus starting Oct. 23.
"On the Rocks," Reviewed: Sofia Coppola's Self-Questioning Film About a
Richard Brody reviews "On the Rocks," directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Rashida Jones and Bill Murray as daughter and father.
'On the Rocks' Review: Bill Murray Reteams with Director ...
Editor: Sarah Flack. Music: Phoenix. With: Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans, Jessica Henwick, Jenny Slate, Barbara Bain, Nadia Dajani, Musto Pelinkovicci, Jules Wilcox, Alexandra Mary ...
On the Rocks review: Bill Murray shines in Sofia Coppola's breezy
On the Rocks' premise seems at first to fall easily in line: A frazzled New York mother named Laura (Rashida Jones), her days an endless roundelay of sippy cups and school drop-offs, is more ...
Movie Review: On the Rocks, From Director Sofia Coppola
This review originally ran on September 30, 2020, but we are republishing it as the movie heads to streaming on Apple TV+. On the Rocks, the new movie from Sofia Coppola, has the premise of a mild ...
Review: Bill Murray, Sofia Coppola reunite in 'On the Rocks'
Review: Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola reunite in 'On the Rocks,' with mixed results. The Los Angeles Times is committed to reviewing new theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic ...
On the Rocks (2020)
On the Rocks: Directed by Sofia Coppola. With Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans, Jessica Henwick. A young mother reconnects with her larger-than-life playboy father on an adventure through New York.
On The Rocks Review
On The Rocks Review. Laura (Rashida Jones), Dean (Marlon Wayans) and their two kids live a picture-perfect life in Manhattan, until she begins to suspect that he's cheating on her. As her ...
On the Rocks Movie Review (2020): Bill Murray Drives this ...
Read Parade's review of the 2020 movie "On the Rocks," a sparkling, stylish, smart new Big Apple comedy that reunites Sofia Coppola with Bill Murray.
'On the Rocks' Review: Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola Take New York
On the Rocks is a movie about a mistake: Not Dean's, but rather Laura's. Because she asks her father for advice on what to do about Dean. Hilarity, of the cringing, ridiculous variety ...
On the Rocks Review: Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray Reunite
"On the Rocks" premiered at the 2020 New York Film Festival. It will be released in theaters on Friday, October 2, and will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting on Friday, October 23.
On the Rocks (film)
On the Rocks is a 2020 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola.It follows a father and daughter (Bill Murray and Rashida Jones) as they harbor suspicions about her husband's (Marlon Wayans) fidelity.It had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 22, 2020. It received a limited theatrical release on October 2, 2020, by A24, followed by digital ...
Movie Review: On the Rocks (2020)
Film critic Roger Ebert once said, "All good art is about something deeper than it admits.". On the surface, Sofia Coppola's (" The Beguiled ") On the Rocks is a light comedy about a playboy father and anxiety-ridden daughter snooping on a husband suspected of cheating. The title could refer to Scotch (or Bourbon) on the rocks, a ship ...
On the Rocks
Laura (Rashida Jones) thinks she's happily hitched, but when her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) starts logging late hours at the office with a new co-worker, Laura begins to fear the worst. She turns to the one man she suspects may have insight: her charming, impulsive father Felix (Bill Murray), who insists they investigate the situation. As the two begin prowling New York at night, careening ...
'On the Rocks' Review
'On the Rocks': Film Review | NYFF 2020. Rashida Jones stars as a New York author plagued by writer's block and marital concerns, with Bill Murray as the playboy father who steps in to help in ...
On the Rocks Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 1 ): Kids say ( 1 ): Jones and the always entertaining Murray have a charming rapport, and the supporting characters all stand out, but Coppola's marriage-in-the-city dramedy is thinner than expected. Part caper, part relationship drama, part slice-of-life look at how privileged, 30-something New Yorkers deal with ...
Movie Review
On the Rocks. 2020 Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola Starring Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans, Jessica Henwick, Jenny Slate, Liyanna Muscat, Alexandra Mary Reimer, Anna Reimer ...
On the Rocks
Given that the entire movie is predicated on infidelity (or the possibility thereof), it most certainly isn't. But for adults navigating their own important, sometimes prickly relationships, On the Rocks is filled with teachable moments, cautionary scenes and plenty of discussion points. Sure, the film is rocky in spots.
'On the Rocks' Apple TV+ Review: Stream It or Skip It?
On the Rocks, now on Apple TV+, pairs the elusive and beloved comic star with the director of his greatest performance, A Very Murray Christmas (Lost in Translation is OBVIOUSLY a very close second).
'On the Rocks' review: Sofia Coppola's latest movie, starring Bill
In this cocktail peanut of a movie, Rashida Jones plays Laura, a would-be writer living in a spacious Soho loft with her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) and their two gorgeous daughters.
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The Rock's Remarkable Transformation In New A24 Movie
In today's Fix of entertainment news:An image was released from the upcoming A24 biopic, The Smashing Machine, showing Dwyane Johnson's insane transformation into MMA legend Mark Kerr.
'The Beach Boys' Review: Rock Doc Focuses More on Good ...
Please verify your email address. You've reached your account maximum for followed topics. Heartfelt interviews with Brian Wilson & Al Jardine provide vulnerability & honesty from The Beach Boys ...
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