on the rocks movie review

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

By Richard Brody

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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By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

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

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

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: 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.

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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.

He plays Felix, who was once a legendary New York art-gallery owner and is now retired (though he still sells the occasional Hockney on the side). He’s a wealthy bon vivant on a permanent vacation, hopping from Paris to New York, coasting through the days on a happy haze of steak-and-whiskey lunches and Upper East Side art parties, flirting with every woman who crosses his path, even if he happens to be old enough to be her grandfather. More than just a flirt, Felix, as Coppola presents him, is one of the last of the shameless 20th-century tomcats, the kind of man who will whip around to tell a pregnant stranger “You’re beautiful!” or will take a perverse delight in dropping a caveman pensée like “The bangle is a reminder that women were once men’s property.” He’s a proud chauvinist aristocrat who thinks that it’s a man’s nature (and duty!) to gaze, covet, and spread his seed. He’s quite la-di-da about it, yet perhaps it’s no surprise that Felix’s hedonistic me-first ways wreaked havoc within his own family.

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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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On the Rocks Reviews

Coppola has always shown an affinity for mixing laughter and introspection, and On the Rocks successfully deploys the strategy.

Full Review | Feb 6, 2024

On the Rocks proves to be a successful reunion between Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray, making excellent use of its wider cast and New York setting to offer a sweet and fun-filled 90 or so minutes of cinema.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2023

A serious subject depicted through a lighter perspective, possessing fascinating character interactions, and a premise that ends up being a lot more engaging (yet still somewhat predictable and formulaic) than what's expected from it.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jul 24, 2023

On the Rocks is a paint-by-number Sofia-Coppola with a “This Is 40” schema.

Full Review | Jun 26, 2023

What could Sofia Coppola possibly be thinking? Why would she make this intensely complacent film?

Full Review | Sep 22, 2022

Once Bill Murray enters the fold, it becomes a mildly more enjoyable film, but the tropes have not aged as well as Murray’s considerable, understated charm.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 3, 2022

On the Rocks is light but lovely, dripping with delicious dialogue and capturing captivating chemistry between Rashida Jones and Bill Murray.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

Sofia Coppola handles her story and its themes with a effectively light touch.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

On the Rocks is an elegant, wry and subtle play on relationships that has all the earmarks of Sofia Coppola, one of the most successful female indie directors ever with seven distinctive fiction feature films to her name.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2022

[Bill] Murray is effortlessly charming. ... But the chemistry between this father-daughter pair lacks the sizzle. ... And in a broader comedy like On the Rocks, their banter isn’t as sharp as it should be.

Full Review | Aug 17, 2022

Even though it's not [Sofia Coppola's] most achieved work, the marvelous chemistry between Rashida Jones and Bill Murray is worth a watch... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 21, 2022

There is nothing I dont love about On The Rocks. The film is an endearing and charming tale that not only captures the beauty of New York City but examines the duality and dynamic of the husband/wife and father/daughter relationship.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 18, 2022

Even though the surface story resolves itself in a bow, there's a fascinating unresolved tension to the conclusion that lingers well after it's over.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 17, 2022

Romantic drama is supposed to work like this fine example. Cheers Coppola!

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jan 25, 2022

Director Sophia Coppola teams again with Bill Murray for a sweet, dryly funny film...

Full Review | Dec 2, 2021

The daughter-father relationship is relatable and the entertaining film offers a welcome escape from today's heavy news.

This is by far the warmest and most engaging film we have seen from Sofia Coppola, whose films have always made great use of spaces and silences.

On the Rocks feels a bit like what you'd get if Woody Allen and Wes Anderson made a movie together - only with a lot more feminine energy, empathy, and understanding.

A charming confection.

There's nothing quite like the holidays for taking stock of family drama, and Sofia Coppola finds whatever your unsettled issues are and pokes them with this deeply funny and absolutely merciless pointy stick of a comedy.

Full Review | Sep 9, 2021

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

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

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

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On the Rocks

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

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Laura : It must be very nice to be you.

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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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‘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.

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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

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…

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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• 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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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 review - Bill Murray flirts with disaster in daddy-issues comedy

Murray is entertaining as ever opposite Rashida Jones in Sofia Coppola’s comedy about a father and daughter, but its fundamental lack of substance lets it down

B ill Murray amiably shows up on autopilot for this high-concept, low-octane New York caper from writer-director Sofia Coppola – the title of course playfully combining the specifications for a classy cocktail with a warning of imminent disaster.

The film requires Murray to reprise some of his witty, man-of-the-world ennui from Coppola’s 2003 Tokyo-set smash Lost in Translation in which he struck up a friendship with a lonely, vulnerable younger woman, played by Scarlett Johansson – only now he’s a silver fox, playing opposite the estimable Rashida Jones, who is supposed to be his actual daughter. The film itself melds the daddy motif of earlier Coppola pictures (such as Somewhere from 2010 ) with Woody Allen’s elegiac view of classic Manhattan and the uproarious light-comedy adventures to be had without real consequence in that fabled city. Murray brings his droll, cool affect around with him everywhere he goes in this movie like an opera cloak, and it’s something that only he could bring off. But he always looks as if he could be thinking about something else, and the light sing-song intonations can betoken anything or nothing. It’s amusing in an undemanding way, but like any great comic, he still needs material.

Murray plays Felix, an art dealer who has evidently grown wealthy enough not to work terribly hard and live a whimsically irresponsible lifestyle, cruising around New York in outrageously showy sports cars, or being driven everywhere by his loyal chauffeur. He is devoted to his daughter Laura, played by Jones, despite having angered her and wrecked her childhood by cheating on her mom as part of his wayward style. Laura is now married to Dean (Marlon Wayans) whom Felix cordially mistrusts as a rival for his daughter’s affections. But when Laura suspects that Dean is cheating on her with his beautiful colleague Fiona (Jessica Henwick, from Game of Thrones), she incautiously confides her fears to Felix, who then insists on putting the supposedly caddish Dean under surveillance. Soon Laura and Felix are a father-daughter spy duo, snooping on Dean from afar outside restaurants and clubs. Poor Laura needs her dad’s insights into the male roué mind, but the reminder of his own infidelity is increasingly painful. And she is exasperated when Felix wants to goof off their spying job so he can take her to classy joints that were stylish in his day.

There are some cheerfully amusing moments, and I’m a sucker for the time-honoured routine when someone impatiently grabs the binoculars from someone else, thus dragging the straps across that person’s scowling face. But really the banter and the elegance needs some substance in the script and it really isn’t here, or not enough of it, and the serious moments seem glazed in a kind of negligent unseriousness. At one stage, Felix has to tell Laura that the younger woman for whom he left her mother has now died, and he is momentarily stunned at the realisation that he has outlived her. But that seems like nothing more than a minor, martini-soaked wobble. As for Laura, Jones isn’t required to get genuinely angry, but she is also too subdued and concerned to get into the spirit of farce.

There are some nice minor moments. Felix’s own mother, coolly played by Barbara Bain, is still alive, and in one family scene is instantly alert to the possibility that her granddaughter’s marriage is in trouble. And I liked the performance from Jenny Slate (like Jones, a veteran of the much-missed TV comedy Parks and Recreation) who is someone that Laura has to make polite conversation with at the school drop-off as she drones incessantly on about her emotional life.

On the Rocks is naturally indulgent towards Murray. No other approach could work or make sense. He is always entertaining to watch on some level and he gives a nice rendition of the song Mexicali Way. In any case, a real confrontation would mean a tragic fracturing, a tonal shift towards a different sort of film that would unbalance the whole thing. But there is no equivalent of the doomy romantic rapport that Murray achieved with Johansson in Lost in Translation. The movie isn’t on the rocks; it just timidly hugs the shore.

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On The Rocks

Running time: 96 minutes. Rated R (some language/sexual references). In select theaters Oct. 2. On AppleTV+ Oct. 23.

In the pantheon of perfect Bill Murray roles — “Caddyshack,” “Groundhog Day,” “Lost In Translation” — his smooth-talking character in the new comedy “On The Rocks” ranks as one of the best.

He plays Felix, a suave New York renaissance man and art dealer in Sofia Coppola’s wonderful movie — the pair’s first narrative feature collaboration since 2003’s “Lost In Translation” — which premiered Wednesday night in the New York Film Festival.

Murray, bless him, brought me back to the New York we all miss like hell; the city of late-night spontaneity we’re told we might not get back.

All of us, for example, have experienced some version of this scene: In the middle of the film, a cop pulls over Felix’s red sports car, which he’s been speeding like a NASCAR driver up and down Manhattan, and spots a bottle of Krug Champagne in the cupholder. The officer tells him to get out of the car.

“O’Callahan. Are you Tommy’s boy?,” he says to the shocked cop. Two minutes later, after regaling the guy who almost arrested him with stories about his grandfather and his family home in the Adirondacks, Felix is off the hook. Every waiter is “George!”, every party is, in some way, his own. What any of us wouldn’t give for a spontaneous night of rule breaking and lounge hopping with a genuine NY character, like Murray’s, again.

Coppola’s funny and slyly emotional film, which should be cherished, is the closest we’ll get to that for a while.

The rowdy evening is spent with Laura (Rashida Jones), Felix’s less flashy daughter who suspects her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans at his most tender) is cheating on her with a leggy new business partner. Days earlier, Felix had Dean followed, and spotted him having dinner at J. Sheekey in London and shopping at Cartier on Fifth Ave. Suspicious.

So, the duo hops Felix’s car and secretly trails the hubby around New York to try to catch him in the act. The movie is an expense account bar crawl dream: they visit 21, the Soho House and Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle. Felix brings along a tin of caviar — “American,” he admits — while cooly rattling off his theses on masculinity.

“He’s male,” Felix, a notorious womanizer himself, says of Dean. “It’s his nature. Males are forced to fight to dominate and impregnate all females.” Murray, as only he can, makes a remark that would get most men slapped in the face totally adorable.

When Murray quietly discusses a de Kooning painting or bonobos or why the Plaza is the perfect hotel for infidelity, every one of Coppola’s lines sparks with pathos and raunchiness — like a TED Talk at Hooters. He also forges a delicate, sweet, believable father-daughter relationship with Jones, whose textured Laura is yet another reason to love this movie.

Laura lives in Soho with her two daughters and husband, while attempting to write a novel and enduring her own Groundhog Day loop of taking the girls to school and being forced to listen to another, single mom dish about her latest boy toy in the pick-up line.

Outside of Murray’s classic New York persona, Laura’s home life features some of Coppola’s finest writing. She isn’t sit-com harried or brusquely professional. Laura always carries a Strand tote bag and is reliant on a nearby baby sitter. Jones’ restrained frustration will strike a chord with many.

But it’s Murray who’s turned in a modern New York movie treasure. File Felix right next to J.J. Hunsecker, Arthur Bach and Addison Dewitt.

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‘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 Sofia Coppola's comedy, On the Rocks .

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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It’s become unfashionable to express fondness for vintage Woody Allen films, but think back to how pleasurable they could be before all the off-camera baggage muddied those memories and you have some idea of the warmly satisfying experience of On the Rocks . Distinguished from those predecessors by its wry female point of view, Sofia Coppola ‘s smart, breezy comedy about a marriage that may be in trouble and a meddling father who steps in to save or destroy it stars Bill Murray in peerless deadpan form, bouncing off a superb foil in Rashida Jones . Oh, it’s also a sparkling ode to the Manhattan we all miss.

Following its New York Film Festival premiere, the A24 release goes out Oct. 2 in select theaters around the world; its light touch and jazzy rhythms should find plenty of admirers, even more when it drops three weeks later on Apple TV+ . This marks Coppola’s third collaboration with Murray, following Lost in Translation and the holiday special A Very Murray Christmas . There are aspects of his work in both those projects in his droll characterization here as Felix, an irresistible operator who has made a fortune as a high-end art dealer and also fancies himself a bit of a lounge crooner.

Release date: Oct 02, 2020

Felix’s daughter Laura (Jones) has a complicated relationship with her father, a bon vivant still living according to some archaic international jetsetter playbook that requires him to turn up his suave séducteur setting with every attractive woman he encounters. In a dialogue snippet from Laura’s childhood heard over the opening, he tells her: “Remember, don’t give your heart to any boys. You are mine until you’re married. Then you’re still mine.” He continues to treat her like his little girl, and even in her late 30s she finds some security in that while at the same time rolling her eyes at the outmoded attitudes of men from his generation.

Laura has long since formed her own family, with her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) and their two adorable daughters, elementary school-age Maya (Liyanna Muscat) and toddler Theo (played by twins Alexandra and Anna Reimer). But domesticity in their fabulous SoHo apartment is stifling her sense of self and her creativity, judging by the lack of progress on a book project.

When Dean returns from a London business trip still zonked from the Xanax he took on the flight, Laura interprets his distraction during a romantic moment as a sign he’s losing interest. His late nights at the office, reluctance to commit to a summer vacation rental, and the woman’s toiletries bag she finds in his luggage, which he explains he was carrying for his colleague Fiona (Jessica Henwick), all feed Laura’s fear that Dean is having an affair.

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Coppola observes Laura’s discomfort with an amusingly jaded eye for the self-absorption of well-heeled New Yorkers. Her face is a knot of preoccupation as she drops off Maya at school and endures the chatter of the other mothers. One assures her, unsolicited, that the alarming redness of her skin following a chemical peel will look stunning in a few days’ time, while another ( Jenny Slate in a delicious running gag) compulsively overshares details of an affair that started during Hurricane Sandy.

In a moment of vulnerability that she will come to regret, Laura confides in her dad, who validates her doubts about Dean, based solely on his first-hand knowledge of men’s natural disinclination for monogamy. “The bangle is a reminder that women were once men’s property,” Felix tells her while appraising the gift on her wrist from Dean.

This is one of many cultural observations that in Murray’s simultaneously ironic and sincere delivery are seemingly erudite but flagrantly out-of-sync with 21st century gender politics. His account of the evolutionary development of the classically desirable female form is a hilarious nugget of historical arcana filtered through the warped prism of the male gaze. Coppola has a lot of fun exploring the conflict between father-daughter affection and sharp attitudinal divides, aided immeasurably by the entertaining chemistry between Jones and Murray.

Felix’s unreconstructed views on male and female roles are evident in a funny scene with his besotted granddaughters, in which Laura comes home to find he’s been teaching them how to shuffle cards and bluff, “and that girls should wear their hair long and pretty, how boys like it.” Later in a bar, he confesses he might be going deaf: “I can hear everything fine except women’s voices. I think it’s the pitch.”

Taking charge of her possible marital dilemma over Laura’s objections, Felix at first suggests standard sleuthing moves like checking Dean’s phone. But when that turns up nothing conclusive, he persuades her that the situation calls for serious detective work.

In a scene that fully cements the debt On the Rocks owes to sophisticated Hollywood comedy-mysteries of the 1930s and ’40s — Coppola specifically cites The Thin Man as an influence — Felix insists they follow Dean on a company dinner. His idea of remaining incognito is to leave his regular car and driver at home, turning the night into an adventure by picking up Laura in a vintage red convertible with a pair of binoculars and a snack pack of caviar and champagne.

What keeps all this blithe privilege from becoming obnoxious, paradoxically, is Coppola’s winking acknowledgement that it’s grounded in coddled experience, not covetous materialism. The writer-director balances disapproval with resigned admiration for Felix’s ownership of New York City — indeed, perhaps the entire world — as his personal playground. The portrait inevitably suggests elements of Coppola’s own larger-than-life father and his cronies.

In the priceless conclusion of that sports car scene, while tailing Dean, father and daughter are pulled over for speeding by an initially prickly Irish cop (Mike Keller). Watching Felix wrap the officer around his little finger using old family connections but also just innate charm is a hoot.

The movie shifts pleasingly into full-blown caper mode when Dean announces he’s going on a company trip to a Mexican beach resort and Felix insists they follow him, resulting in a humiliating discovery for Laura.

Sofia Coppola Developing Edith Wharton Drama at Apple

Throughout the script, Coppola elegantly sprinkles in questions about men’s ability to be faithful, and the compromises expected of women to make marriage work. These observations often are exchanged in the plush Upper East Side drawing rooms or the ritzy supper clubs, bars and restaurants that are Felix’s hangouts, where he invariably knows the waiters by name and often runs into a lady friend who just might be looking to offload a Hockney. (Kelly Lynch turns up briefly as one such presumed former flame with assets.) Even before the photographs displayed in Felix’s apartment reveal shots of him with Andy Warhol and Barack Obama, it’s clear he mixes in very influential circles.

Philippe Le Sourd’s caressing camera savors the swanky environments with a delight that will be elixir to any of us who ever craved the New York high life. Perhaps even more inebriating are the many shots of streets and skyscrapers at night, glittering with a defiant majesty that seems a lifetime away from the city’s current sad, half-spent state under the pall of 2020. The silky flow of Sarah Flack’s editing feels similarly luxuriant.

Music is always a key part of Coppola’s aesthetic. Mirroring her use of Air in The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation , she steers the action along to cool electronic tracks by French synth band Phoenix (the director is married to frontman Thomas Mars), stirring in occasional jazz and pop standards. A highlight among those is Felix serenading the assembled guests at a beach bar with “Mexicali Rose,” a silly-sweet interlude that wears down our resistance as much as Laura’s.

There’s a lovely, unforced quality to the way Laura’s anxieties about her marriage intersect with unresolved feelings about her father’s long-ago infidelity, which crushed her mother and shattered their family. This is played beautifully by the two actors. As Felix reflects back on his need once again to feel that glow of fresh attention that had faded with marriage and parenthood, there’s poignancy in his admission both of his weakness and his regrets: “It was heartbreaking for everyone.” Murray has seldom been better.

Wayans, an actor generally better known for broad comedy roles, is unexpected casting as the husband under suspicion; his smooth manner as Dean keeps us guessing while rooting for him to be the good guy. But On the Rocks is very much a father-daughter two-hander — tender and personal, dryly funny and played to perfection by Jones and Murray. Its effortless touch shows the accomplished, genre-hopping Coppola continuing to expand her range.

Venue: New York Film Festival (Spotlight) Production companies: Apple Original Films, A24, American Zoetrope Distributor: A24/Apple TV+ Cast: Rashida Jones, Bill Murray, Marlon Wayans, Jessica Henwick, Jenny Slate, Liyanna Muscat, Alexandra Reimer, Anna Reimer, Barbara Bain, Juliana Canfield Director-screenwriter: Sofia Coppola Producers: Youree Henley, Sofia Coppola Executive producers: Fred Ross, Mitch Glazer, Roman Coppola Director of photography: Philippe Le Sourd Production designer: Anne Ross Costume designer: Stacey Battat Music: Phoenix Editor: Sarah Flack Casting: Courtney Bright, Nicole Daniels Rated R, 97 minutes

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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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Zendaya rocks vintage Ralph Lauren dress first worn by Cindy Crawford to promote ‘Challengers’ in Italy

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That’s not your average tennis whites.

While promoting her new movie “Challengers” in Milan, Italy on Sunday, Zendaya, 27, posed for photos wearing a sleek, white, halter-neck dress that included a tiny collar detail.

Although fairly simple, the vintage 1991 Ralph Lauren design was expertly tailored to hug the actress’ curves and was once worn by another style icon: Cindy Crawford.

The legendary model, 58, originally sported the look on the runway before the “Dune” star was even born, and quickly took to social media to sing Zendaya’s praises.

“@zendaya serving it up in one of my favorite @poloralphlauren dresses!🤍🎾” Crawford wrote via her Instagram Story, sharing a shot of the “Euphoria” star.

Like Crawford, Zendaya kept things classic when it came to her glam, opting for natural makeup and a similar, voluminous blowout that was parted to one side.

She also kept things simple when it came to accessories.

Instead of adding statement-making pieces, the actress’ longtime stylist, Law Roach, chose a sweet, silver tennis bracelet and coordinating rings, before pairing the throwback fit-and-flare with her go-to white pumps.

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Similar to the “Dune: Part 2” press tour, where Zendaya rocked a variety of futuristic ensembles that went with the theme of the movie, the former Disney star has been stepping out in sporty, tennis-inspired ensembles while promoting “Challengers.”

For the film’s London premiere, she walked the red carpet in a sequined, Wimbledon-inspired Thom Browne gown , which included a collar, pleated skirt, and embellishments in the shape of tiny tennis racquets.

She also paid tribute to the game while in Rome, where she paired a low-cut dress with Loewe pumps that featured tennis balls attached to the heel , among many other perfectly appropriate looks.

“Challengers,” which also stars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, hits theaters nationwide on April 26.

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Why is this 2018 action movie starring The Rock so popular on Netflix right now?

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson started his career as a wrestler in WWE, and that’s what he’s been doing again as recently as WrestleMania. Outside of the ring, Johnson established himself as one of the top action stars in Hollywood. In that capacity, Johnson starred in the 2018 action thriller S kyscraper , which is currently one of the most popular movies on Netflix .

Johnson allows himself to be more physically vulnerable

• It’s Die Hard by way of The Towering Inferno

It has good action sequences

Although Skyscraper is not Johnson’s best action movie, it is underrated compared not only to his own films but also to the rest of the modern action flicks. So, if you’re looking for an action fix this week, here are three reasons why The Rock’s Skyscraper is an underrated action movie.

Black Adam may have been Johnson’s first comic book movie, but he’s been playing nearly invulnerable superheroes for years. We could fill up an entire essay about the way Luke Hobbs — Johnson’s character in the Fast and Furious films — is so over-the-top that he breaks a cast on his arm by flexing his muscles. That’s not a feat that Will Sawyer — Johnson’s character in Skyscraper — can pull off.

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At the beginning of the movie, we see the incident where Sawyer loses part of his leg while serving on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Sawyer uses an artificial leg for the rest of the film, but it limits what he can physically do. In many ways, this is still a typical Dwayne Johnson action flick, but it seems rare to see The Rock in fights that he’s no longer guaranteed to win. That sense of desperation on Sawyer’s part adds tension to the film.

It’s Die Hard by way of The Towering Inferno

Is Skyscraper as good as Die Hard ? No, of course not … and it’s not even close. Die Hard is a peak action movie and still our favorite Christmas flick. But Skyscraper is enjoyable on its own terms, and it does shake up the Die Hard formula a bit by adding elements from The Towering Inferno . Sawyer was only supposed to inspect a massive building in Hong Kong as a security consultant, but he finds himself framed for an attack on the building that leaves several of its highest floors on fire.

More pressingly, Sawyer’s wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), and their two children are trapped in the building when the fires begin. Since Sawyer was on the outside during the incident, he has to break back into the building to save his family and clear his name. As Die Hard clones go, it’s pretty good at retelling an old story.

In almost every Dwayne Johnson movie, the action is almost as much of a draw as he is. Skyscraper doesn’t reinvent the genre, and it’s not innovative. But it doesn’t have to be. The only thing this movie promises is around 90 minutes of PG-13 action thrills, and that’s what it delivers.

Ironically, Skyscraper had a very disappointing run at the box office, ending with under $70 million domestically. But to the vast majority of Netflix subscribers, it plays like a brand new action movie they’ve never seen—and it’s a lot better than Johnson’s original Netflix film, Red Notice .

Sometimes, you just have to take your wins where you can find them. And right now, Skyscraper is a bigger hit on Netflix than it ever was in theaters.

Watch Skyscraper on Netflix .

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Spring is here, but it's still a little brisk in much of the country, meaning you may have to lean on the best kids' movies on Netflix right now a little longer. Fortunately, Netflix has a massive collection of kid-friendly movies, from beloved classics to fun originals, and even some original choose-your-own-adventure stories you won't find anywhere else.

Making sure your kids are watching something age-appropriate is crucial, but you don't want to spend all day scrolling to find something. So, we've done the heavy lifting. This list is updated every month with the best kids' movies on Netflix. This month, a funny-spooky franchise hits the platform and a racing snail zips onto the list.

Netflix continues to build an impressive library of action films. Whether you're interested in violent action films (The Equalizer, Extraction 2, The Outpost) or sci-fi action (The Hunger Games, 65, Looper), Netflix has multiple genres to choose from to satisfy your action needs.

Scrolling through Netflix can be daunting, especially if you don't know where to look. For April, we curated a list of three action films you need to watch. Our selections include a bloody revenge saga, a prison neo-noir, and an action thriller starring one of Hollywood's biggest names. Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)

Sometimes, the most popular movies on Netflix are not the best movies on the streamer. Case in point: M. Night Shyamalan's Glass is currently at No. 3, and that film somehow pulled off the unique feat of retroactively making Shyamalan's previous movies in his superhero franchise, Unbreakable and Split, a lot less fun.

That's why we're specifically putting the spotlight on a terrific movie, Amadeus, as it celebrates its 40th anniversary this year by streaming on Netflix. We're also featuring The Bricklayer, an action thriller that will probably be on top of Netflix's movie charts by the end of the weekend. This film barely registered at the box office, but that's never stopped the Netflix effect before.

Movie Review: Should you watch 'Sasquatch Sunset' about a family of Bigfoots? Not yeti

This image released by Bleeker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg in a scene from the film "Sasquatch Sunset." Credit: AP

Do you reckon Sasquatches snore? C'mon, you know the answer, deep down. Of course, they do. They snore and eat noisily and pick bugs out of each other's fur and then eat those bugs, noisily.

What else do Sasquatches do, you wonder? One of the wildest movies of the year — or the century, for that matter — suggests they mourn, cuddle, bury their dead, enjoy throwing rocks in rivers, make art and wonder if they're alone in the world.

Even so, “Sasquatch Sunset” from filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner, is a bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that's as audacious as it is infuriating. It's not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.

Nathan Zellner, Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Christophe Zajac-Denek play a makeshift family of four Sasquatches, lost in hair suits and prosthetics and communicating only in grunts, snorts and howls. They also pee a lot.

Why the filmmakers hired such starry actors instead of paying scale to some unknowns is puzzling. None of the Sasquatches do more than what could be called Method Chimpanzee — jumping up and down, whooping and growling. A group of real chimps would ding the quartet for overacting.

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As an exercise in creating empathy for monsters, “Sasquatch Sunset” does an admirable job. In the first frames, when we see a loping Bigfoot in the middle distance — and then three more — it's clear that they are telling this story, not the folks who usually capture them in shaky camera frames.

There are plenty of Sasquatches-are-just-like-us moments, like when one brings flowers to seduce another or two Bigfoots comfort each other after a death. Perhaps the most poignant moments are when they pound trees with sticks in unison, a rhythmic question that echoes through the valley. It's a call, waiting for a response — anyone out there like us?

This image released by Bleeker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Nathan Zellner in a scene from the film "Sasquatch Sunset." Credit: AP

But then there's a lot of gross-out stuff. We've mentioned the peeing, but it turns out that Sasquatches sneeze, procreate loudly and like to touch their genitals and then smell their fingers. They can also poo on demand and throw that poo to scare off predators.

One juvenile Bigfoot makes his hand into a makeshift puppet and talks to it — like a nod to the kid in “The Shining” — and another considers inserting his manhood into a small tree hole, like a prehistoric riff off that famous scene in “American Pie.”

Both things can be true, of course: Bigfoot can be disgusting and deep at the same time. But it's not always clear what the filmmakers are going for here — satire, metaphor, sympathy, naturalism or gross-out comedy?

The Sasquatches reveal deeply human characteristics and may be stand-ins for our innocent pasts, a lost link in our evolution, showing the unrelenting violence of natural life or just the voiceless among us now. Or the filmmakers might just like the image of tossing poo.

This image released by Bleeker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek in a scene from the film "Sasquatch Sunset." Credit: AP

Gorgeous vistas of pristine forests and misty valleys don't help us figuring out when this all takes place but gradual clues emerge, including evidence of logging and a truly surreal bit at a human camping site, scored by the Erasure song “Love to Hate You.” But if the Zellners had an environmental lesson here, they shanked it.

There's great music from The Octopus Project, veering from bright electric guitar noodles to sci-fi electronic dread reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Stick through the roll of end credits and see one of the best credits ever in film: Sasquatch Wrangler. You don't see that every day. You don't see Sasquatch movies every day, either, but this is one you should probably let lope past you.

“Sasquatch Sunset,” a Bleecker Street release that lands in some theaters on April 12 and goes wider April 19, is rated R for “for some sexual content, full nudity and bloody images.” Running time: 89 minutes. One star out of four.

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Online: https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/sasquatch-sunset

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Review: In ‘The Outsiders,’ a New Song for the Young Misfits

The classic coming-of-age novel has become a compelling, if imperfect, musical about have-not teenagers in a have-it-all world.

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By Jesse Green

For many young misfits and wannabes, “The Outsiders,” published in 1967, is still a sacred text. Written by an actual teenager — S.E. Hinton drafted it in high school — it spoke with eyewitness authority to teenage alienation. Even if its poor “greasers” and rich “socs” (the book’s shorthand for society types) now seem like exhibits in a midcentury angst museum, their inchoate yearning has not aged, nor has Hinton’s faith that there is poetry in every soul.

These tender qualities argue against stage adaptation, as does Francis Ford Coppola’s choppy, murky 1983 movie. (It introduced a lot of young stars, but it’s a mess.) The material doesn’t want sophisticated adults mucking about in it or, worse, gentling its hard edges for commercial consumption. Harshness tempered with naïveté is central to its style and argument. To turn the novel into a Broadway musical, with the gloss of song and dance that entails, would thus seem a category error worse even than the film’s.

And yet the musical version of “The Outsiders” that opened on Thursday has been made with so much love and sincerity it survives with most of its heart intact. Youth is key to that survival; the cast, if not actually teenage — their singing is way too professional for that — is still credibly fresh-faced. (Five of the nine principals are making their Broadway debuts.) That there is no cynical distance between them and their characters is in itself refreshing to see.

Also key to the show’s power is the director Danya Taymor’s rivetingly sensorial approach to the storytelling, even if it sometimes comes at a cost to the story itself. Many stunning things are happening on the stage of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater — and from the sobs I heard the other night, in the audience, too.

Some of those sobs came from teenagers, who can’t have seen in recent musicals many serious attempts at capturing the confusions of youth. Though witches, princesses and leaping newsboys can be entertaining, their tales are escapes from reality, not portraits of it. From the start, “The Outsiders” is gritty — literally. (The stage is covered with synthetic rubber granules that kick up with each fight and footfall.) There is no sugarcoating the facts as Hinton found them: Her Tulsa, Okla., is an apartheid town , the greasers subject to brutal violence if they dare step into the socs’ territory or, worse, lay eyes on their girls.

But the unavoidable cross-clan romance — between the 14-year-old greaser Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant) and the soc Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman) — is something of a MacGuffin here. The score, by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance of the folk duo Jamestown Revival, working with Justin Levine, gives them just two songs, neither really about love.

The musical is more interested in the greasers themselves, in various permutations. There’s the fraternal romance of the full gang, as in “West Side Story”; the lyrics of their establishing number, “Grease Got a Hold,” will sound familiar. (“Play it cool, little brother, and you’ll have it made.”) There’s the veneration of their scary alpha, Dallas (Joshua Boone). And there’s the literal brotherhood of the Curtis boys. The oldest, Darrel (Brent Comer), has sacrificed his hopes of escape to care for Ponyboy and Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) after the death of their parents in a car crash.

The central relationship, though, is between Ponyboy and Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch), a 16-year-old already bearing a life’s worth of sorrow. It is they who meet the soc girls at the drive-in, who get attacked by the girls’ letter-jacketed menfolk, who go on the lam after an act of self-defense and draw spiritually closer (there are no homoerotics) in the tragedy that ensues.

I’m glad to say the musical doesn’t stint on that tragedy; the book by the playwright Adam Rapp (with an assist from Levine) goes everywhere the novel does. A rumble, a murder, a suicide and a fire are just some of the stops on its trail of tears.

But depicting all these big events while also making room for a full slate of songs has required some compromises in a show that (I can’t believe I’m saying this) may be too short at 2 hours and 25 minutes. The novel’s first-person point-of-view, retained here as direct-to-audience narration by Ponyboy, feels like a too-expedient trade-off, drawing us out of the immediate action into some implied future. Even so, in the second act especially, incidents butt up against one another with insufficient connective tissue; it’s bone against bone.

The songs are squeezed too — a shame because many are lovely. Jamestown Revival has just the right sound for the material, blending guitar-based folk and foursquare period rock into classic balladry for emotional high points. (They really come through with “Stay Gold,” a gorgeous 11 o’clock yearner for Johnny and Ponyboy.) But as is common for theatrical newcomers, their style doesn’t offer the ear or the drama enough variety, and the lyrics are too generic and gangly to further character development.

If the impact of the songs is intermittent, the design and flow of “The Outsiders” is endlessly effective. Though this is the first musical Taymor has directed, she brings with her from plays like “ Pass Over ” and “ Heroes of the Fourth Turning ” a gift for complexities of pain and varieties of darkness.

Befitting the milieu, the set, by the design collective AMP and Tatiana Kahvegian, is modest: a tractor tire, a junker car, a bunch of wooden boards. But it reconfigures itself as fast as the characters’ febrile emotions, the tire becoming a fountain, the car a bed, the boards a bier.

Beyond that, it’s hard to separate the design disciplines here, especially in the devastating, rain-soaked climactic rumble, which, though aestheticized, remains brutal with its time-lapse mayhem. Staged by the choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, its effectiveness is as much a matter of the lighting by Brian MacDevitt, projections by Hana S. Kim, costumes by Sarafina Bush and special effects by Jeremy Chernick and Lillis Meeh. As for sound, it’s hard to describe the astonishments Cody Spencer puts in our ears: what a child hears when his parents brawl, what it sounds like inside a concussion, how a car roars in memory.

Given its subject, point-of-view, author and even its title, “The Outsiders” should not benefit so much from the expertise of insiders. To the extent it succeeds anyway, it’s because it offers faithful service to a story that is sometimes almost embarrassingly sincere. How many musicals unblushingly quote Robert Frost? (“Stay Gold,” a reference to one of the novel’s most famous lines, is drawn from Frost’s poem “ Nothing Gold Can Stay .”) How many make a song of Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” and in doing so create them?

It’s a strange paradox of Broadway that its bigness, when used humbly, can honor quite delicate ideas. Whether it can sustain them is another story. In “The Outsiders,” they are not sustained; the structural problems mean its achievements don’t stick. But they’re still achievements, and a show need not be for the ages to be for the moment. In that sense it’s fair, citing Frost, to call it golden — nature’s “hardest hue to hold.”

The Outsiders At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; outsidersmusical.com . Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.

An earlier version of this review in one instance misidentified the folk duo that wrote the score for “The Outsiders.” It is Jamestown Revival, not Johnstown Revival.

How we handle corrections

Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions. More about Jesse Green

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Movie Review: Should you watch ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ about a family of Bigfoots? Not yeti

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Nathan Zellner in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

Jesse Eisenberg attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Jihae Kim attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The Octopus Project’s Yvonne Lambert, Josh Lambert and Toto Miranda, from left, arrive for the Texas premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at the Paramount Theatre during the South by Southwest Film Festival on Monday, March 11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP)

Christophe Zajac-Denek attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Christophe Zajac-Denek, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner and Jesse Eisenberg, from front left, arrive for the Texas premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at the Paramount Theatre during the South by Southwest Film Festival on Monday, March 11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP)

Emily Meade attends the premiere of “Sasquatch Sunset” at Metrograph, Monday, April 1, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

This image released by Bleecker Street shows Riley Keough in a scene from the film “Sasquatch Sunset.” (Bleecker Street via AP)

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Do you reckon Sasquatches snore? C’mon, you know the answer, deep down. Of course, they do. They snore and eat noisily and pick bugs out of each other’s fur and then eat those bugs, noisily.

What else do Sasquatches do, you wonder? One of the wildest movies of the year — or the century, for that matter — suggests they mourn, cuddle, bury their dead, enjoy throwing rocks in rivers, make art and wonder if they’re alone in the world.

Even so, “Sasquatch Sunset” from filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner , is a bewildering 90-minute, narrator-less and wordless experiment that’s as audacious as it is infuriating. It’s not clear if everyone was high making it or we should be while watching it.

Nathan Zellner, Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Christophe Zajac-Denek play a makeshift family of four Sasquatches, lost in hair suits and prosthetics and communicating only in grunts, snorts and howls. They also pee a lot.

Why the filmmakers hired such starry actors instead of paying scale to some unknowns is puzzling. None of the Sasquatches do more than what could be called Method Chimpanzee — jumping up and down, whooping and growling. A group of real chimps would ding the quartet for overacting.

As an exercise in creating empathy for monsters, “Sasquatch Sunset” does an admirable job. In the first frames, when we see a loping Bigfoot in the middle distance — and then three more — it’s clear that they are telling this story, not the folks who usually capture them in shaky camera frames.

There are plenty of Sasquatches-are-just-like-us moments, like when one brings flowers to seduce another or two Bigfoots comfort each other after a death. Perhaps the most poignant moments are when they pound trees with sticks in unison, a rhythmic question that echoes through the valley. It’s a call, waiting for a response — anyone out there like us?

But then there’s a lot of gross-out stuff. We’ve mentioned the peeing, but it turns out that Sasquatches sneeze, procreate loudly and like to touch their genitals and then smell their fingers. They can also poo on demand and throw that poo to scare off predators.

One juvenile Bigfoot makes his hand into a makeshift puppet and talks to it — like a nod to the kid in “The Shining” — and another considers inserting his manhood into a small tree hole, like a prehistoric riff off that famous scene in “American Pie.”

Both things can be true, of course: Bigfoot can be disgusting and deep at the same time. But it’s not always clear what the filmmakers are going for here — satire, metaphor, sympathy, naturalism or gross-out comedy?

The Sasquatches reveal deeply human characteristics and may be stand-ins for our innocent pasts, a lost link in our evolution, showing the unrelenting violence of natural life or just the voiceless among us now. Or the filmmakers might just like the image of tossing poo.

Gorgeous vistas of pristine forests and misty valleys don’t help us figuring out when this all takes place but gradual clues emerge, including evidence of logging and a truly surreal bit at a human camping site, scored by the Erasure song “Love to Hate You.” But if the Zellners had an environmental lesson here, they shanked it.

There’s great music from The Octopus Project, veering from bright electric guitar noodles to sci-fi electronic dread reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Stick through the roll of end credits and see one of the best credits ever in film: Sasquatch Wrangler. You don’t see that every day. You don’t see Sasquatch movies every day, either, but this is one you should probably let lope past you.

“Sasquatch Sunset,” a Bleecker Street release that lands in some theaters on April 12 and goes wider April 19, is rated R for “for some sexual content, full nudity and bloody images.” Running time: 89 minutes. One star out of four.

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Online: https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/sasquatch-sunset

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

‘The First Omen’ Review Fat Guys at the Movies

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Rated R Opens: April 5, 2024 Kevin says THE FIRST OMEN Kinda rocks! They’ve rebooted HALLOWEEN and THE EXORCIST. The next 70s horror franchise to get another go is THE OMEN. THE FIRST OMEN takes us back before the original film, telling the story of a young woman serving at a Roman orphanage before she […]

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