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Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman are relentlessly entertaining in marriage-breakdown comedy 'The Roses'. It's a Hollywood remake worth watching

- Clarisse Loughrey

It's hard to imagine what a faithful remake of Danny DeVito's The War of the Roses (1989), adapted from the novel by Warren Adler, would look like in 2025. It's a pitch-black, sickly fable of a marriage felled by material obsessions, driven into a death spiral of attempted murder, assault, and feline fatality.

It's not that it couldn't be recreated today, more that the impulse for it isn't there. Love is hard. We know that. It's dead and buried in Tinder's “About me” section. What screenwriter Tony McNamara has teased out in his new iteration, simply named The Roses, is an even crueller tragedy: that two people can be entirely aware of the pitfalls and still drive into them headfirst.

Ivy (Olivia Colman) and Theo Rose (Benedict Cumberbatch) meet in as much of a whirlwind as Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner's characters did three or so decades ago. Here, he bursts into her restaurant kitchen in order to escape his fellow architects. He eyes up her knife with particular excitement. Instead of bloodshed, however, they walk into the walk-in fridge and have sex.