Movie Review : On The Rocks

Review by Raghav Raj

The On The Rocks movie poster

Director: Sophia Coppola

Rating: 6/10

Review: By the time Sofia Coppola’s latest film, On The Rocks, finds any sense of urgency, it’s approximately 10 minutes away from rolling the credits.

Up until this point, the endeavor that Laura (Rashida Jones) and her mischievous bon-vivant father (the ever-affable Bill Murray) have embarked on — to find out if Laura’s entrepreneur husband (Marlon Wayans) is cheating on her — has felt somewhat directionless, even if it’s often quite enjoyable to watch. 

That enjoyability, when it’s not coming from some good-to-great performances from the three main characters (not to mention a few truly hilarious cameos from Jenny Slate), comes from watching Coppola at work, gracefully displaying the distance between Laura and the men in her world. The cinematography, as usual, is minimal and beautiful, visually isolating and endlessly purposeful in its motions.

Often, Coppola films Laura in her domestic anguish with a sense of intent, and she instills far more purpose in her cinematography than she does to the story itself. With a script that feels far too thin to have ever been fully realized, On The Rocks plods along for nearly all of the runtime trying to find what it wants to say. And, by the time it does, it’s already lost most of us.

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