The Roses
Searchlight Pictures | Release Date: August 29, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
58
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 38 Critic Reviews
Positive:
21
Mixed:
14
Negative:
3

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
85
SlashfilmEthan AndertonAug 25, 2025
The Roses is the kind of movie you should be seeing with a crowd, even if it doesn't seem to demand a big screen experience. See it with your parents. See it with your significant other. Just see it. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubLuke HicksAug 30, 2025
The leads are magnets, whether they’re surgically picking each other apart with the cruelty of Caligula or steaming up a seductive romance. Their remarkable rapport makes The Roses essential viewing, a must-watch rom-com. Read full review
83
Original-CinLiz BraunAug 28, 2025
This is a brisk, blackly comic film about love, marriage and the exigencies of adult life. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyAug 30, 2025
None hold a candle to the main event: pulverising verbal jousts between two stars who can toggle between serious and silly like few others. Watching them cajole, manipulate and savage each other is effervescent bloodsport: you want neither to win, or the fun will stop. Read full review
80
Film ThreatAlan NgAug 29, 2025
In the end, The Roses feels like a genuine comedy comeback. Jay Roach proves he hasn’t lost his touch, pulling together a film that blends smart writing, impeccable timing, and powerhouse performances into something that may just be a classic new take on a rebooted story. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonAug 28, 2025
Roach has insightfully made this about people, not societal scapegoats. He and McNamara have changed up nearly everything in this disaster except its vibrations of dread. Read full review
80
TheWrapWilliam BibbianiAug 25, 2025
An ambitious comedy, not because it’s so big but because it’s so delicate. This film could crumble at any minute. It veers dangerously from misery to whimsy to horror to hope. Read full review
80
BBCCaryn JamesAug 25, 2025
Throughout, Colman and Cumberbatch's performances make the dialogue much funnier than it sounds in print. Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyAug 25, 2025
The pair operate at a low simmer of hysteria that feels farcical without ever losing believability, while treating sincere emotion like the bursting of a dam that threatens to drown them together. They love as they hate in The Roses, decadently and without restraint. Read full review
80
Screen RantRachel LaBonteAug 25, 2025
With such incredible performers as Colman and Cumberbatch at the center of it all, though, it's easy to have a blast. You'll want them to break up just as much as you want them to make up, and that is the most impressive thing of all. Read full review
70
TimeStephanie ZacharekAug 29, 2025
Cumberbatch and Colman make it all believable, their jokes pinging off one another with delightful, rancorous buoyancy. Read full review
70
Rolling StoneDavid FearAug 28, 2025
Any argument that one doesn’t need a new spin on the Douglas-Turner black comedy is rendered more or less moot by the way [McNamara] sets up Cumberbatch and Colman with such gleefully profane, razor-sharp barbs. Read full review
70
Little White LiesLeila LatifAug 28, 2025
If the film doesn’t radically deepen the conversation around the gender politics or financial intricacies of marriage, it does find new textures in the way ambition corrodes intimacy. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyAug 25, 2025
The lead actors’ combative chemistry is what keeps Jay Roach’s overcrowded remake zingy even when it threatens to turn from savage to sour. Read full review
67
IndieWireKate ErblandAug 26, 2025
That McNamara has written a truly new spin on Adler’s novel is genuinely refreshing, but the lighter tone and greater reliance on actual romance between its leads makes what’s to come all the harder to swallow. Read full review
64
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzAug 25, 2025
The Roses is not nearly acrimonious, or funny, enough to justify its peculiar existence. If DeVito’s original was the cinematic equivalent of going through the divorce from hell, this new break-up feels more like a trial separation. Read full review
63
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenSep 17, 2025
Colman and Cumberbatch easily keep up—they’re comic talents too—yet the best parts of The Roses involve the two of them alone together, either happily or in detest, leaving dazzling trails of repartee as they zip along. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreSep 1, 2025
It’s still nasty fun, just not as nasty and acridly funny as that ’80s comic trio of Turner, Douglas and DeVito were able to make it. Read full review
63
Washington PostTy BurrAug 28, 2025
Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 28, 2025
Roach and screenwriter Tony McNamara sought a different perspective for the material. The result is more dramatic, less over-the-top, and proves to be tonally uneven. The humor is muted and less overtly vicious, but the more serious approach doesn’t quite succeed. Read full review
63
The Seattle TimesBethany Jean ClementAug 25, 2025
For those who like their comedy so dark that it’s practically blackened, may I present The Roses. Read full review
60
EmpireHelen O'HaraAug 28, 2025
It’s not the toothless remake we feared, and is often very funny, but there’s a slight imbalance between the Roses that blunts some of its effect. Read full review
60
Time OutAnna SmithAug 25, 2025
The Roses gets off to an enjoyable start, but like the marriage at its centre, the novelty wears off. Read full review
60
ColliderRoss BonaimeAug 25, 2025
As it stands, The Roses has its charms, but it could’ve used a few more thorns. Read full review
56
Paste MagazineJesse HassengerAug 28, 2025
Much of The Roses languishes in second gear, with glints of amusement (Colman doing an Ian McKellan impression; the Englishness of punctuating or preceding insults with “darling”) that only accumulate in a way that makes the movie feel a little safe, compared to the genuine rancor and bitterness of the earlier film. Read full review
50
ObserverRex ReedSep 2, 2025
Remakes are odious, even when they’re nothing more than harmless television takeoffs on successful feature films, but The Roses is an especially egregious waste of time and talent because it takes itself so seriously. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzAug 29, 2025
Roach is a director who can do stylish, clever compositions when it suits him, as demonstrated in his flamboyantly silly “Austin Powers” movies. But you wouldn’t know it from this film, which prizes information delivery over visual pizzazz to such a degree that it often feels more like a pilot for an HBO comedy series than something that can only be properly appreciated on a big screen. Read full review
50
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiAug 28, 2025
Colman and Cumberbatch’s appealing energy is always a pleasure — and clearly the draw here — but I didn’t enjoy spending my night with the sourpusses it’s wasted on. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonAug 28, 2025
Unfortunately, “The Roses” is a toothless take on the material. The stakes are never as high as they were in the 1989 movie, and the film takes too much time trying to humanize these people. By the time they’re actively trying to sabotage and murder one another, the movie has completely lost its nerve. The end result feels rushed and weak-willed. Read full review
50
The Associated PressMark KennedyAug 28, 2025
There are dark marriage comedies and then there’s “The Roses,” an escalating hatefest that, by the time a loaded gun comes out, all the fun has been sucked out. It’s hard tonally to go from microaggressions to the burning of someone’s prized books to attempted murder and stay a comedy. Read full review
50
Screen DailyTim GriersonAug 25, 2025
Director Jay Roach’s adaptation proves too broad and tonally erratic. In the process, he undermines game work from Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as a husband and wife who can still sometimes see past their animosity to remember the love that once seemed indomitable. Read full review
50
USA TodayBrian TruittAug 25, 2025
Rather than being an entertaining trainwreck, the finale nihilistically undermines all the good and thoughtful stuff that came before, doing the couple dirtier than they ever could to each other. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineJustin ClarkAug 25, 2025
The War of the Roses, both the book and the Danny DeVito film, is an infamously brutal comedy of terrors, and The Roses is cuddly by comparison. Read full review
40
The New York TimesAlissa WilkinsonAug 29, 2025
I’m here to litigate “The Roses,” and on that front I’m quite confident that it’s a strangely boring failure, whoever’s at fault. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawAug 25, 2025
The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage. Read full review
35
The Daily BeastNick SchagerAug 25, 2025
With very rare exceptions, it’s less entertaining than a year’s worth of marriage counseling. Read full review
30
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithAug 30, 2025
As the Roses start to become increasingly hostile to each other in front of others, the tone is meant to be hilariously nasty. Instead it’s merely monotonously vulgar, as a long string of one-liners relies more on the supposed shock value of profanity than on wit. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonAug 28, 2025
By taking the “dark” out of the dark comedy, “The Roses” can’t decide what it wants to be, and becomes as flimsy as its setting: Mendocino is played by a seaside town in Devon, United Kingdom, and it looks more like New England than Northern California. Read full review
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